The saint, the flamingos, and the disappearing giraffe

La grande bellezza (The great beauty)

Crit

A heaping helping of Fellini and a soupçon of Last Year at Marienbad in this sort of episodic film that's sort of about a 65-year-old author of a single novelette, based on the great lost love of his youth, who has never written anything else because he has been too busy living in a Felliniesque Roma, which is both the real central character of the film and the best of many excellent candidates for title character. Not much happens, and everything happens, and beauty is.