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When I heard that Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) was “Felliniesque,” that didn’t recommend it at all. By “Felliniesque,” I mean the most stunning and unconventional traits of such films as La Dolce Vita, 8½, and Juliet of the Spirits: basically, a person undergoing a personal crisis in an increasingly surreal, carnivalistic setting that suggests an oncoming psychotic break—or divine intervention—or both; a liberal use of the grotesque sweetened with a Christian-humanist compassion; the hovering presence of institutional—and maybe even a bit of real—religious piety; a choppy narrative style that leaves you wondering not just about the story but also about time and consciousness themselves; and a deeply conservative nostalgia for a more traditional, organic, family-centered, and religious society.

Fellini had an enormous impact on film and culture in general, but very few directors had the face to imitate his most characteristic dramatic gestures, and most of them were punished for their hubris. For instance, after making three of the greatest films in history back to back, David Lean evidently wanted a challenge. So he tried to do Madame Bovary set in Ireland in the style of Fellini. The result, Ryan’s Daughter (1970), almost destroyed his career. Kurosawa did something similar in Dodes’ka-den (1970), a critical and commercial flop that drove the director to a suicide attempt. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Fellini homage Santa Sangre (1989) is the weakest movie of his career. Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), which pays homage to 8½, wasn’t a disaster, though it is hardly among his best works. Allen’s Radio Days (1987), an homage to Amarcord, Fellini’s most conventional and sentimental film, is a true stinker.

Imitating Fellini is a way to set yourself up for critical failure, for the moment I detect Felliniesque touches, I think, “Well, well. This had better be good.” I had no desire to watch Sorrentino plunge into the sea having melted his waxen wings. So I gave La Grande Bellezza a pass.

What a mistake. La Grande Bellezza is a wonderful film which owes a great deal to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita with touches of 8½ and Roma.

In La Dolce Vita, Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini, a 30-something celebrity journalist with artistic and intellectual aspirations. These aspirations, however, are rapidly aging and will soon molder into pretensions unless he actually completes the novel he has told his friends about. But Marcello is too distracted by the sweet life of Rome’s café society: basically, drinking and chasing skirts. Eventually, he abandons journalism and his novel and becomes a dissipated PR man.

In La Grande Bellezza, Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a journalist, dandy, and bon vivant who is celebrating his 65th birthday. Forty years before, Jep wrote a celebrated novel, The Human Apparatus. But since then, he has frittered away his life on la dolce vita in Rome. Everybody who’s anybody knows Jep, and they seem to like him. Jep’s journalism seems to focus on art, which is a sure entre to high society.

Jep seems to be quite wealthy. His apartment appears to be on the Celian Hill and has a huge terrace with a spectacular view of the Colosseum. There are oddities, though, at least to American eyes. His kitchen is tiny—barely big enough for himself and his maid. But this is not unusual in older European apartments, even the best of them. Truly odd is that Jep seems to sleep on a sofa bed in his study, surrounded by books. This suggests an intellectual intensity that Jep carefully hides from the public.  Jep is also highly nocturnal and drinks far too much, often alone. He always seems to drink from the proper glass, though, so he’s not an alcoholic. Alcoholics are people who drink directly from the bottle.

Jep’s artistic promise has been frittered away. But his ambitions have not turned into empty pretensions. Instead, he fully accepts his failure and lives without ambition or pretense in a state of  ironic detachment.

Jep has a small circle of friends. Romano is a struggling playwright in his 60s who still lives in student housing and is infatuated with a grotesque, hatchet-faced harlot who treats him like dirt. Viola is a wealthy widow with an insane son named  Andrea. Dadina is a dwarf who edits the magazine where Jep works. Dadina’s boyfriend is a leading poet.

Jep’s friends are quite different from Steiner’s salon in La Dolce Vita. With Jep, there are no pretensions. Most of Jep’s friends seem to have a deal: they enjoy one another’s company, but they don’t force each other to confront their failings and causes for regret. Perhaps you need that, when you have more life behind you than ahead. This movie forces us to confront the unkindness of time, which requires great humility if we are to accept it.

When one of the circle, Stefania—a Leftist who wrote a number of socially-engaged novels and now poses as a committed mother of four—criticizes Jep for being a selfish aesthete, he brutally humiliates her by exposing her pretensions: her novels were published because she was the mistress of the head of the Communist Party; she’s married to a rich homosexual; she has a bullshit career in television and goes out every night, leaving her children to be raised by a small army of servants. Jep doesn’t object to any of this, though. His only objection is to Stefania pretending to be better than she actually is. Stefania storms out, but eventually she and Jep reconcile.

Jep knows all the best people in Rome, including the best tailors.

Jep Gambardella is basically Marcello Rubini if he had finished the novel and then dedicated himself to journalism and la dolce vita. Jep has also somehow avoided Marcello’s descent into PR and degeneracy, probably because Jep was never all that into sex. Instead, his greatest pleasure is playing the game of high society, of which he is an absolute master. (His discourse on the etiquette of funerals is brilliant.)

Jep’s art does not just involve making friends and contacts. It also involves cutting a fine figure before the world in general. In a way, Jep is a far more successful playwright and actor than Romano. For Jep, the world is his stage. But it is hard to call Jep a narcissist, because he doesn’t take the self-image he constructs all that seriously. In fact, he doesn’t take anything seriously.

Jep seems to believe that the secret to spiritual ease is ironic detachment. If he doesn’t aim high or try hard, he won’t feel deeply—deep pain or deep joy. He just fills his days with what comes easy, and a lot comes easy to him because he’s highly gifted. He’s had a charmed life. He’s like a water bug, skittering over the surfaces of things, never falling through into the depths, because he keeps everything extremely light.

It seems to be working for Jep. Basically, the story of La Grande Bellezza is how it stops working. Jep’s emotional detachment is broken by a series of shocking losses, which lead him to feel both deep loss and deep compassion.

First, he learns of the death of Elisa, his first and only love, from her husband of 35 years. He feels Elisa’s loss but also deep compassion for her widower, who tells Jep that he read Elisa’s diary, which revealed that Jep was the only man she ever loved and described her husband as merely a “good companion.”

When Viola’s son Andrea commits suicide, Jep takes a stripper named Ramona to the funeral, explaining in advance the etiquette of funerals and exactly what he will say. He is emphatic that guests must never cry at funerals. At the funeral, he gives a note-perfect performance. But when the priest asks Andrea’s friends to come forward to carry out his coffin, it becomes clear that Andrea had no friends. Jep comes forward, followed by three of his friends, all of them old enough to be Andrea’s father. As they carry the coffin out, Jep breaks down.

Jep’s relationship with Ramona is strange. First he reconnects with an old friend who runs a strip club. Then the friend introduces him to his daughter, Ramona. What kind of father employs his daughter as a stripper?

Ramona and Jep

Ramona is sun-browned, leathery, and a bit past her prime. But Jep isn’t interested in her for sex. He simply enjoys her company. He also enjoys introducing her to Roman high society. If this were a Woody Allen film, it would be an attempt to make everyone else uncomfortable. But we sense none of that with Jep.

Their best sequence is a party for the modern art set, followed by a surreal midnight journey into the palaces of the old Roman aristocracy: the people with real money and real taste. There is a touch here of Fellini’s depiction of the Black Nobility in Roma.

Ramona has a secret, though. She spends a lot of money, and her father says he can’t figure out what she spends her money on. Eventually Jep and Ramona make love. Then she tells him what she spends her money on: medical treatments. Sorrentino has already subtly suggested that she will soon die, and in one of the movie’s most jarring and confusing jumps, we learn that she is now dead.

At a garden party at what appears to be an aristocrat’s country house, Jep approaches Cardinal Bellucci, who is supposedly the leading candidate for the next Pope. He seeks spiritual guidance. This is a big step for Jep. He has heard that in his youth, the Cardinal was the greatest exorcist in Europe. Is that Jep’s problem? The Cardinal, however, only wishes to talk about food. He barely registers Jep’s request and is immediately distracted by a society woman who wants to show him something exotic: the estate’s pet skunks. This depiction of the church owes a lot to 8½ and Roma.

The last sequence of the film revolves around the visit of Sister Maria, a 103-year-old nun who is a missionary in Africa. Although Sister Maria sleeps on a carboard pallet and eats only roots, she is fêted lavishly by the Catholic church and other religious leaders. But she does not dine with the Pope, she dines with Jep Gambardella and some of his friends. Sister Maria, it seems, was a fan of The Human Apparatus. Dadina thinks the Sister wants to do an interview. But she says that she took a vow of poverty. You don’t talk about such a life. You simply live it. Apparently, she just wanted to met Jep.

The next morning, before dawn, Jep finds Sister Maria and her assistant on his terrace surrounded by flamingos taking a rest from their migration. When Sister Maria asks Jep why he never wrote another novel, he says that he was waiting for a vision of “the great beauty.” Sister Maria exhales strongly, and the birds fly away. It is a genuinely magical sequence.

Throughout the film, however, Jep is surrounded by great beauty. He’s in Rome! He’s an aesthete in Rome. He is an aesthete in Rome whose friend Stefano has the keys to all the great museums and palaces of Rome, which Jep can visit any time, no tickets, no tourists, no rush.

The movie is filled with genuinely magical encounters with beauty, even in the most unlikely places. For instance, at the end of a very droll satire of modern paint-flinging by an emotionally disturbed child (Jackson Pollack meets Greta Thunberg), where we expect a punch line and a laugh track, we are stunned with a genuine vision of beauty.

So what was Jep waiting for? Obviously, something had been blocking his ability to really receive and be stirred by the great beauty around him. By contrast, Sister Maria and her assistant—whatever you might think of their religious beliefs, and they are almost comically by-the-numbers Catholic—are genuinely open to great beauty. Jep, apparently, wasn’t—before now.

La Grande Bellezza is a movie about spiritual change. Catholics would call it “grace.” The story ends with a ray of hope: Sister Maria reaching the top of a sacred staircase on her hands and knees, seeking “plenary indulgence” for her sins—and Jep by the sea, viewing the wreckage of the Costa Concordia and perhaps finally ready to start another novel.

La Grande Bellezza is a deeply reactionary movie. It opens with a long epigraph from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. Romano is adapting D’Annunzio for the stage. Later, in another of his plays, Romano makes an impassioned case for nostalgia. Nostalgia, of course, is inherently anti-progressive, for progressives believe that the future is always better than the past. Sister Maria dines solely on roots, because, she says gnomically, “Roots are important.” Even though Romano’s new play promises to be the first success of his career, he closes it down after one performance, because he wants to live its message, not merely act it. He leaves Rome for his home village. He is returning to his roots.

Jep too feels deep nostalgia, not only for his youth, but also for an older Rome that towers above the current one, spiritually, morally, and aesthetically. For Jep, this is not ancient Rome, but the Rome of the Popes and the Black Nobility. There is a great deal of inspired satire of the modern art scene, in which frauds like performance artist “Talia Concept” disport themselves among the ruins of ancient Rome, lavishly supported by the current bourgeoisie. This, in the city where the church and the aristocracy once fostered geniuses like Bernini and Caravaggio.

These are just my first thoughts on La Grande Bellezza. I plan to revisit it again and again. It is a vision of great beauty that puts most contemporary cinema to shame. You should see it.