La noia della grande bellezza: Il film di Sorrentino attraverso il romanzo di Moravia

della Costa, Francesco 2016. La noia della grande bellezza: Il film di Sorrentino attraverso il romanzo di Moravia. New Readings 16 , pp. 42-59. 10.18573/newreadings.3

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Abstract

This article proposes to read the 2014 Oscar Prize winning film La grande bellezza, by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, alongside Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel La noia, taking as a starting point the similarities between the works’ protagonists: Jep Gambardella, an eccentric failed writer, in Sorrentino’s film, and Dino, a painter who quits painting and is involved in a troubled love story, in Moravia’s novel. Both works are homodiegetic narrations of their respective protagonists’ memories; both focus on their artistic failure and psychological distress; both of them connect failure and distress with a desperate love. The anthropological analysis of the film’s plot and its dialogues aims to demonstrate that film and novel alike, show the existential crisis of an individual: in the novel, the protagonist’s crisis is transfigured into the feeling of tedium and deals with the problem of possessing Cecilia’s body; in the film, it is symbolised by the upsetting relationship with beauty and is mediated by the languages of memory, love and the sacred. La grande bellezza may be considered a representation of man’s difficult relationship with reality, in its tautological alternation of beauty and triviality, just as La noia was fifty years earlier.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	1359-7485
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	02 May 2023 18:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/128919

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