The new movie by Paolo Sorrentino, this year's Oscar and Golden Globe winner for best foreign film, is his fifth to star Servillo but the first to have a release here outside festivals.
Servillo, whose titanic performance anchored Il Divo, the director's dizzyingly operatic portrait of Giulio Andreotti, is arecognised elder statesman of the Italian stage. And he is the central figure here in a rapturous, sumptuous, decadent and ultimately desperately sad fantasia about life in contemporary Rome.
In a performance at once superficial and soulful, he plays Jep Gambardella, a once-celebrated journalist now nearing retirement. Gambardella wrote a novel in his 20s that may have been a masterpiece or pretentious twaddle - we are never sure which.
He is the ultimate man about town: his rooftop terrace, which overlooks the Colosseum, is the site of all-night parties where people say things like "the Ethiopian jazz scene is the only interesting one nowadays". But behind the host's fixed smile is pain at the loss of a young love, which the film keeps flashing back to.
As he moves through his daily life - which is represented as a series of sybaritic set-pieces - Sorrentino allows past and present to overlap and commingle: reality, memory and fantasy become indistinguishable in the life of a man whose search for the title's grande bellezza has arrived at the conclusion - which he announces in a shocking, crucial scene - that "we are all on the brink of despair".
It's a cineaste's delight this, the kind of sensual experience you need to strap yourself into your seat for. Technically astonishing, it's an assemblage of swooping cameras, painterly compositions, rich colours, dazzling chiaroscuro and a stunning soundtrack, which runs from sacred music to Yolanda Be Cool's We No Speak Americano There are obvious echoes here of Fellini's landmark anatomy of 60s anomie, La Dolce Vita: Mastroianni's character in that film was a journalist, too. But to see this as a Dolce Vita for the Berlusconi era sells it short.
In the opening scene, a camera-toting Asian tourist gazes out over the Eternal City and collapses - literally unable to bear such beauty. By the end, it's the ugliness behind the beauty that we are present to. A masterly, visually ravishing valentine to Rome and what the Romans call Romanita - Romanness - it is drenched with sadness for everything the city is not any more.
