Diving into the sea or just walking along the shoreline remains a source of undiminished bliss and purifying solace for Leo, a moment when his persistent penury, failures, defeats, and the unyielding solitude that he struggles to flee as obstinately as he keeps seeking it out all are summarily wiped off by a sudden plunge underwater, an instance of physical and spiritual redemption that this young man is unable to find elsewhere. “I dived in and swam until I was out of breath. Then I turned and played dead, listening to the swish of the water around my ears. I felt good, I couldn’t remember ever feeling that good.”

This, in many ways, could be the very best that life has to offer Leo Gazzara. He fritters away his days and nights in Rome, on sleepless hours with Arianna or in tumultuous all-night benders with his pal Graziano, while all he’s desperately trying to do is reshuffle the worthless cards that life has dealt him. In this, as so many critics were all too quick to point out, he is the incarnation of Marcello Rubini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and now, with the wisdom of hindsight, of Jep Gambardella of La Grande Bellezza (2013). Both films are about the aimless lives of well-heeled journalists whose careers were taken over by worldly ambitions when in truth their deeper vocation was literature, a dream destined to be perpetually postponed if not altogether shelved. As colorful as Marcello’s life may seem, the shallow itinerary of his day-to-day is a perpetual skidding from one woman to another, one nightclub after another, one gathering, one soirée, one person, to the next. Gambardella’s itinerary is hardly different. Clearly inspired by Fellini’s classic from fifty-plus years earlier, Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a far less somber portrait of the decadent lifestyle of the privileged few and reflects an Italy that moved on following its startling postwar boom of the early sixties, then survived the Anni di piombo of the seventies and eighties—the “Years of Lead,” when Italy faced an endless assault of political carnage that eventually claimed the life of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978—only to come out as elegantly disenchanted and unflappably put-together, but no less feckless and disaffected, than the sixties Rome of Fellini’s speckling Via Veneto. As Jep chastises Stefania in the famous balcony scene, “We’re all on the brink of despair.” This never changes. It sits on every page of Calligarich’s novel. His characters, unless gainfully employed or blinkered by upward mobility, sit on the brink of despair, condemned, as each is, to a staring contest with the abyss, sensing all along that the abyss is winning. What holds them together, what feeds and enables their internal atrophy, is Rome itself.