Let's get this straight from the start: no one's really likely to mistake me for Jep Gambardella, the louche, ageing playboy protagonist played by Toni Servillo in Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 masterpiece The Great Beauty.
Jep has been for decades the playful, elegant fulcrum of Rome's high-end social life, a man whose stated and achieved ambition is not just to be invited to all the best events but to possess the very power to make them a failure. I probably don't even have that much influence over my son's birthday parties.
He is, meanwhile, perhaps the most dapper male character in modern film (I'd call it a tie with Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love). Yes, I have occasionally, in mid-summer, donned a pair of Jep-like white trousers, but with the nagging and very British worry that the achieved look is less "Rome high life" and more "at Cliff Richard's villa with the Blairs". As a wheezy asthmatic I can't even smoke with any conviction.
It's not as if Gambardella is a particularly admirable figure. A man who cheerfully concedes he has squandered his talents – after a promising youthful novel he fell into an intellectually shallow life as a gossip journalist – he is simultaneously a deeply social creature and emotionally distant, with few genuinely close confidantes. He can even be openly cruel, as when he callously and publicly dissects the hypocrisy of a rich and hypocritical friend's left-wing pretensions.
So why the identification? In part it's because Gambardella is such an engaging presence: playful, impish, watchful, simultaneously of his world of slightly grotesque socialites and an amused, detached observer.
He enjoys one of the truly great cinematic introductions, amid the decadent chaos and thumping, anonymous electropop of his own 65th birthday party. Sorrentino spends a full five minutes leading us around the rooftop festivities, the camera swooping between revellers, before we finally encounter, at the centre of it all, Gambardella, slowly turning to face the viewers with an expression of exquisite, subtle mischief. Who would not wish to be him?
The real kinship comes with Jep's paradoxical everyman status. He might occupy a rarefied world, but his preoccupations are universal. After his birthday he learns of the death of his first, and possibly only, love – who, he subsequently discovers, never lost her feelings for him – sparking something of an existential crisis, albeit an exceedingly urbane one.
While occupied by his looming demise and the nagging idea that he has wasted his life, Gambardella's defining characteristic, as suggested by the film's title, remains a permanent awareness of the beauty all around him. He pads around unrealistically empty Roman streets at night, at once deeply familiar with the city's marvels and quietly, gratefully appreciative. In one scene he slips away from a grisly party where a precocious and anguished child artist is splattering paint over giant canvases to lead a friend around a usually-locked palace filled with treasures.
Jep's sense of everyday magic is sometimes deliberately exaggerated by Sorrentino, for example when an aged, Mother Theresa-like nun, sitting wrinkled and beatific on the majestic terrace of Gambardella's city centre apartment, wordlessly communes with a flock of flamingoes.
Indeed, Jep's attitude to religion is something of a microcosm of his wider perspective. While notably sceptical – he repeatedly encounters a senior cardinal apparently interested only in discussing recipes for duck – this arguably never becomes cynicism; never precludes the possibility of transcendence.
There's an obvious rejoinder to all this: it's one thing appreciating the beauty around you when you have no worries about money and, seemingly, little in the way of work commitments beyond occasional lunches with a diminutive, wise editor. Being Jep Gambardella on jobseekers' allowance in Croydon might prove more of a struggle.
That is, to an extent, to miss the point. Since first watching The Great Beauty, Jep's worldview hasn't necessarily percolated into my life through canary yellow linen jackets accessorised with elegantly folded pocket handkerchiefs, though I'll confess to having been occasionally tempted. His story is a more universal reminder: however glorious and ubiquitous we believe ourselves, that metaphorical Kierkegaardian roof tile could land on our head around the very next corner. Don't be taken in by the falsehood and vanity, Jep tells us, but equally don't let it obscure the view of all that is worthy of worship.
So what of me? I might be mainly found cycling round a grey London in corduroy, not gallivanting between high-end Rome parties in linen and silk, but at any moment I can channel my inner Jep to reveal to wonder all around.
Read an interview with Servillo
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