Elijah van der Fluit is a writer for The Hollywood Insider based in California with aspirations to write and direct films for a professional career. In his spare time, Elijah enjoys watching and discussing movies of all genres as well as reading, hiking, spending time with family, and being one with the world. Elijah believes that art, whatever form it may take, has the ability to inspire and broaden people’s perspectives in a positive way and he hopes to use his work in film and writing to do so.
Feb 13, 2025
Table of Contents
The role that Italy has played in film history is significant with Neorealist greats such as Roberto Rossellini or stylized auteurs like Federico Fellini shaping a view on the world that is both fantastical and honest. In modern Italian cinema, the most significant voice that has the same priority of both style and substance is the underrated, yet internationally recognized Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino. His filmography, as diverse and far reaching as it is, remains one of the best modern cinematic styles in both visual and thematic terms. Visual feasts and introspective looks into loss, aging, and beauty in his spiritually grounded world of cinema make him a modern day film auteur worth looking into.
The first note of Paolo Sorrentino’s films is how they most of the time follow people of very wealthy lifestyles, living days full of parties and finding themselves in high class circles. Politicians, accomplished journalists, and prestigious stars are among those who lead the audience through Sorrentino’s worlds. His most popular film, the Oscar winning ‘The Great Beauty’ (2013) follows accomplished journalist Jep Gambardella, played by Sorrentino’s favorite actor, the beaming Toni Servillo. Gambardella goes to parties every night, enjoys his days in his beautiful apartment neighboring the coloseum, and manages to easily be suave with beautiful women in his old age. Despite his grand success in journalism with the nightly parties and active social life, Gambardella regrets many paths he took in his younger years, sentimental for people who no longer have a place in his fast moving world. What good is being rich if you lose your soul? The film leisurely takes Gambardella on a journey for true satisfaction which he finds not in the allure of the high life, but the beauty that rests under it all.
‘Loro’ (2018), best exemplifies Sorrentino’s portrayal of exuberant yet overall unsatisfactory high life status, following the real life businessman, Silvio Berlusconi, who has accumulated an almost embarrassing level of wealth and success. He has enormous houses, hosts exuberantly vulgar parties, and even becomes the prime minister. The overall world showcased is much like an Italian ‘Wolf of Wall Street’. But by the film’s end, his degenerate behavior gets the better of him and the way in which he is portrayed doesn’t feel as if he is human. The oddities about him such as his plastic surgery that makes it so he has a permanent smile on his face or a large volcano sculpture in his larger than life backyard. While most buy into his status as one of the most powerful figures in Italy, there is a fairly insightful scene where he attempts to use his charms on a young girl who instead finds him pathetic and sad. By the end of the film, Berlusconi has no real emotional connections to anyone or anything. He is just an empty shell of a human ruling in this world, but with no true bonds to anyone or anything significant.
While these films elicit an understandable appeal to the beautiful girls, enormous houses, illustrious social lives, and a presentation of all with such attractive means through cinema, the character’s story is always brought full circle by the end with conclusions that all of these people, despite their indulgences, do not find complete satisfaction with life as it is. Leading from this is a theme Sorrentino tends to focus on which is about how fast life can move, leading to unsatisfactory elder years.
It is not difficult to notice that nearly all of Paolo Sorrentino’s films tend to focus on the reality of aging and the struggles of adaptation to the younger times. While other first time directors are consumed by their youth when making their first film, Sorrentino’s freshman feature ‘One Man Up’ (2001) depicts how the promising life of a young drug obsessed rockstar or a fit athletic sports star is swallowed up by the changing circumstances of a continuing life. Both have to take undesired turns in their careers, giving way to an unflinching showcase of a real struggle that by the end has somber ramifications for both.
Sorrentino uses this theme in connection with Federico Fellini where with ‘The Great Beauty’, Jep is often compared to Marcello Rubini in ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960). Both are journalists living rich lifestyles in Rome, but the obvious difference is that one of them, that being Marcello, is young, ambitious, and full of energy for life. Jep is older, more experienced, and while still full of life and energy, has a more reflective journey and by the film’s end has gone through a sort of enlightenment that inspires him to write a new book decades after his first and only hit novel. The two films are full of similarities in terms of characters, setting, and style, their overall conclusions are separate but in the same world.
‘Youth’ (2015) has this theme of aging at its core where it follows two longtime friends, one an accomplished composer and the other a fading movie director. The composer, performed marvelously by Michael Caine, has found peace in his retired life while the director, played by Harvey Keitel, is still on the mission to make one last hit film before his life goes away. Both men face different struggles in terms of their decaying lives and end with different conclusions. Through a leisure pace, ‘Youth’ on one hand portrays one’s older years as a dead end, spent in apparent comfort reflecting often on what could have been in the young ages. Who could have had more of a presence and which paths could have opened up different outcomes? And would they have been better?
But, Sorrentino does not always portray the process of aging negatively. The flip side that ‘Youth’ presents is that the elder years can be an opportunity to reinvent. A way of finding a new part of one’s inner self with inspiration to face life with a different, improved mindset as Michael Caine’s character achieves by the film’s end. Whether it’s in childhood, youth, or an older age, a person can find a meaning or call to life if they have a mind for it.
Any Paolo Sorrentino film does not feel like any other movie released today as they achieve a certain spiritual mise-en-scène that weaves itself into a world of parties and scenes of vulgarity. For one, many of them take place in spiritual places such as the churchly Roman structures of ‘The Great Beauty’ or being about the pope system itself in his HBO series ‘The Young Pope’ (2016) which are presented with Sorrentino’s etherial camerawork.
But, it isn’t just what religious elements are in Sorrentino’s work that give them an otherworldly aura to them, but the film’s color palette, moody song choices, and nonconventional pacing give a unique experience. Often, they are contemplative and have sequences that only function to let the audience spend more time in the world. Michael Caine described the feeling of watching his films perfectly as he said that there are no sections that feel fast or slow, but functions like water in a river, continually flowing never going back or speeding up or slowing down. Just going by at its own pace that Sorrentino is inviting the audience to join with.
Paolo Sorrentino may not make films that are understood or appreciated by everyone, the majority of Italy for one do not largely appreciate the romanticized version of their country in ‘The Great Beauty’. Nevertheless, Sorrentino is an excellent example of how aspiring filmmakers can maintain their vision in a more modern era. In a world where for the most part, cinema is used for the purposes of monetary gain rather than artistic expression, Sorrentino continues to make films of a deeply personal and unique nature, acting as a beacon of hope for future directors wanting to create something greater than themselves, whether they’re Italian, American, or everything in between. His newest film, ‘Parthenope’ (2024), appears to conform to Sorrentino’s stylish tendencies. It is the next in a short but significant line of unique films beaming with style, spiritual strength, and intimate reflections on the fast paced journey that is a lived life.
By Elijah van der Fluit
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I am sure I am speaking for a multitude of Cinema lovers all over the world when I speak of the following sentiments that this medium of art has blessed me with. Cinema taught me about our world, at times in English and at times through the beautiful one-inch bar of subtitles. I learned from the stories in the global movies that we are all alike across all borders. Remember that one of the best symbols of many great civilizations and their prosperity has been the art they have left behind. This art can be in the form of paintings, sculptures, architecture, writings, inventions, etc. For our modern society, Cinema happens to be one of them. Cinema is more than just a form of entertainment, it is an integral part of society. I love the world uniting, be it for Cinema, TV, media, art, fashion, sport, etc. Please keep this going full speed.”
Elijah van der Fluit is a writer for The Hollywood Insider based in California with aspirations to write and direct films for a professional career. In his spare time, Elijah enjoys watching and discussing movies of all genres as well as reading, hiking, spending time with family, and being one with the world. Elijah believes that art, whatever form it may take, has the ability to inspire and broaden people’s perspectives in a positive way and he hopes to use his work in film and writing to do so.
Elijah van der Fluit is a writer for The Hollywood Insider based in California with aspirations to write and direct films for a professional career. In his spare time, Elijah enjoys watching and discussing movies of all genres as well as reading, hiking, spending time with family, and being one with the world. Elijah believes that art, whatever form it may take, has the ability to inspire and broaden people’s perspectives in a positive way and he hopes to use his work in film and writing to do so.
Elijah van der Fluit is a writer for The Hollywood Insider based in California with aspirations to write and direct films for a professional career. In his spare time, Elijah enjoys watching and discussing movies of all genres as well as reading, hiking, spending time with family, and being one with the world. Elijah believes that art, whatever form it may take, has the ability to inspire and broaden people’s perspectives in a positive way and he hopes to use his work in film and writing to do so.
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