Ever since I started watching films seriously, I’ve been a bit obsessed with lists of the best films. It goes without saying that these are always highly subjective and prone to all sorts of biases but they’re awesome for knowing what’s out there. The problem with lists of great cinema is that they’re heavily weighted towards the great films of the past so that it’s hard to spot anything recent on them. This is why one of the most interesting lists I’ve seen recently is one that limits itself only to films released so far in the 21st century and this film by Paolo Sorrentino had a strong showing on it.

Jep Gambarella is the main character of this film, a 65-year old man now living in Rome. Decades ago in his youth, he received critical acclaim for writing a great novel but he has yet to write a second one. Since then he has lived a life of leisure, occasionally writing articles for a cultural magazine, but mostly hosting the most outlandish parties in Rome. As he puts it, he wanted to have the power to both make and break parties and he achieved it. It comes as no surprise that despite knowing everyone of importance in Rome, he grows increasingly dissatisfied with his life and spends much of his time wandering the streets and observing other people. This feeling of emptiness becomes worse as old friends and acquaintances either die or move away and he even finds himself reaching to religion in search of answers.

The film opens with such an unusual style that I wondered if this were a pure visual film much like Baraka. The camera wanders around restlessly as if reluctant to settle on any single subject. It sweeps past the Janiculum, reportedly one of the best places for a scenic view of Rome, with its throngs of frantically photo-snapping tourists. It moves on to a beautiful shot of a fountain with an accompanying female choir at a church next door. But then all of that is smashed to pieces by the shrill scream of a woman that kicks off a tremendous riot of a party. There’s techno music, wild but surprisingly well choreographed dancing, naked bodies and plenty of alcohol to lubricate it all. It’s confusing and overwhelming, but also mesmerizing and beautiful. The film does eventually get around to introducing us to Gambarella and the circle of friends who show up at his parties, but it never lets you forget that this is above all else a feast for the senses.

It is perhaps trite to compare every ambitious Italian film to the works of Federico Fellini but the parallel here is obvious and inescapable. In La Dolce Vita, Marcelo Mastroianni plays a reporter who yearns to be taken seriously as a novelist. Here, Gambarella is nearly the inverse: he has long ago reached the elite ranks of the cultural literati but is struggling to find any satisfaction from his position. In his role as a magazine columnist, he is critical and cynical towards a modern performance artist whose act consists of running towards a pillar of the Roman aqueducts and smashing her head on it. When a fellow novelist speaks of her public service and her children has become the focus of her life and criticizes Gambarella for , he warns her against sharing too much and believing in her own hype. He cruelly dissects her hypocrisy and points out that the convivial and joyful atmosphere of his parties is possible only because everyone is only politely pretending to believe in the facades presented by everyone else. The lesson is clear: the so-called great artists have feet of clay and are no wiser than ordinary people.

Themes abound in the film, not all of which are readily accessible. The opening contrast of modern art against classical art recurs throughout. In one scene, Gambarella brings a stripper friend, wearing a scandalously revealing dress, to a party. They watch a young girl who has been forced by her parents to perform at the party. The routine consists of her splashing paint angrily at a huge canvas. Then spotting an acquaintance who mysteriously always has a briefcase full of keys with him, he asks him to unlock a nearby building which turns out to be a treasure trove of classical artworks. They spend the rest of the evening entranced, silently walking through the splendid palaces. Other bits are harder to figure out. Despite knowing everyone who matters in Rome, Gambarella seems to have only two real confidantes. One is Romano, a male friend who aspires to be a playwright. The other is Ramona, the aforementioned stripper who is the daughter of a cabaret owner friend Gambarella hasn’t seen for decades. There must be some significance to them having the male and female equivalent of the same name but I don’t know what that means. Reading up on it, I discover a fact that would be known only to those who actually speak Italian: in most of his conversations Gambarella uses an educated Italian accent but with these two close friends as well as his housekeeper, he switches instead to a Neapolitan inflection, his own place of origin.

I haven’t even gone into Gambarella’s lifelong quest for the great beauty and his reasons for never having written a second novel. Or the delightfully humorous way in which the director defies expectations with the character of the mysterious Sister Maria who is due to be canonized as a saint. The density of the ideas in this film is frankly astonishing and I particularly like the thought that at least one of the director’s intentions here is to capture a sense of what Rome felt like when Silvio Berlusconi was Prime Minister. The frenzied nature of the parties feel at times as if they were desperately trying to have fun while the world crashes and burns. There must be plenty of other stuff that I must have missed and I keep feeling that this is a film is just ever so slightly out of my grasp. Still, there’s more than enough here to justify this being counted as a great film and it’s just plain gorgeous to look at.