Mesmerizing movie staging a decadent and beautiful Rome for a decadent character and greatly played by Toni Servillo. Great cast, nice decadent story and, overally, huge directing by Paolo Sorrentino.

Jep Gambardella: "The trains at our parties are the best in Rome. They're the best cause they go nowhere. ......................... This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don't deal with what lies beyond. Therefore... let this novel begin. After all... it's just a trick. Yes, it's just a trick." ................................................................................................................ From my point of view: This may be definitely the best subset of art, applied at the best moment in the movie scene, at the best moment of our living at the beginning of the 21st century. All wisdom said in a couple of sentences, helping us to enjoy life, and understand this way of enjoying as much as we can. Anyway, we do not have any better way to beat the trick of living, than just relaxing, realizing we are part of the trick and we cannot change it. So, just go on, time will pass! :)

CinemaSerf

Mar 28, 2026

7.0

I think it’s quite a testament to the performance from Toni Servillo here that he managed to turn a character that I pretty much despised at the start into one I almost pitied at the end. “Jep” is the literary equivalent of the one-hit wonder, but since writing the “Human Apparatus”, he has successfully sailed through his life in Rome until now, with his sixty-fifth birthday looming, he involuntarily begins to challenge the shallowness of his own existence. Sure, he has had the best of wine, women and song along the way and many of his friends are every bit as profligate and vacuous as himself, but now he is facing a trauma-induced epiphany that compels him (and enables us) to reminisce about the excesses of his life and his failure to ever recreate that one success from decades ago. It’s a stunningly photographed tale of decadence that seems perfectly situated amidst the ancient symbolism of hedonistic Rome and though I could perhaps have done with some deeper characterisations from some of the people who had touched his life over the years, like “Romano” (Sabrina Ferilli), it is maybe that very insubstantiality that resonates best as “Jep” slowly realises his is but a shell of a reality and that it might be just too late to change that. In substance, the plot of lost loves and opportunities isn’t so terribly remarkable, but it’s the style in which they play out that, coupled with the emotionally charged yet understated effort from Servillo, really makes this a classy, seamy and quite addictive piece of cinema.