The Rhythm of Decadence: Sorrentino through Lefebvre
Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema is less about storytelling than attunement. His films, particularly Youth (2015) and La grande bellezza (2013), unfold as sensuous orchestrations of space, memory, and time. Critics often highlight their visual grandeur and thematic concern with aging, loss, and artistic decline, but what’s less commonly explored is their temporal structure: how Sorrentino builds meaning not through causality, but through repetition, cadence, and affective pulse.
Both films center on aging artists reflecting on what remains after beauty fades or success passes. Yet they are not narrative arcs in the conventional sense; they are rhythmic meditations, where form echoes theme. The rhythm of a party, the silence of a mountain spa, the ghostly recurrence of memory—these aren’t just motifs, but organizing principles. Sorrentino doesn’t just show time passing—he renders time, textures it, loops it.
To understand these films more deeply, we can turn to the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and his late work, Rhythmanalysis—a theory of how rhythm shapes everyday life, space, and subjectivity. Bringing Lefebvre into dialogue with Youth and La grande bellezza reveals how Sorrentino functions not merely as a visual stylist, but as a cinematic rhythmanalyst of modern decadence.
In Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre invites us to “listen” to spaces—to perceive the rhythms that underlie the everyday, from the cyclical (bodily, natural, cosmic) to the linear (industrial, capitalist, institutional). Rhythms, he argues, are not simply patterns but affective structures that shape how we inhabit time and space. Sorrentino’s Youth unfolds within just such a space: a luxurious Swiss spa suspended between stasis and slow decay. Here, rhythm is everything. The days pass in ritual repetition—meals, massages, walks, musical rehearsals. It is a site where the body’s rhythms, and those of the natural world, hold dominion over the mechanical tempo of modern life. Fred Ballinger, the retired composer played with great restraint by Michael Caine, withdraws from the linear time of artistic legacy—refusing to conduct, refusing to be summoned back into a world governed by external clocks. Instead, he drifts into a more internal, affective rhythm: one built from memory, regret, and the quiet pulse of lived embodiment.
This is where Sorrentino’s form mirrors Lefebvre’s theory most elegantly. The film’s structure itself is organized not by narrative progression but by repetition and return. Characters reappear in ritual fashion—the levitating monk, the child violinist, Miss Universe undressing in the bath—each cycling back with the regularity of a bell toll or a heartbeat. The camera, too, obeys these logics of drift and glide. Scenes do not so much progress as they accumulate resonance through recurrence. Even the editing obeys a kind of choreographic sensibility: elliptical, lulling, suggestive of dream rather than plot. The rhythms are stable, but they are also hollowed out, stripped of forward motion. What Lefebvre would call eurhythmia—the harmonious interplay of temporalities—becomes, in Youth, a gently melancholic arrhythmia, where life continues without propulsion.
One of the film’s most compelling figures in this regard is the unnamed former sports legend, unmistakably modeled on Diego Maradona. Bloated, largely silent, and trailed by an oxygen tank, he functions as a literal embodiment of disrupted rhythm. Once defined by physical precision and tempo, he is now weighed down by breath, unable to sustain the athletic time that once governed him. Sorrentino stages him almost as a visual counter-rhythm—his stillness and decline set against the ambient luxury of the spa, whose inhabitants remain, at least superficially, in motion. If the spa is a site of cyclical repetition—meant to restore—the former athlete exposes the limits of rhythm itself. Some patterns, once broken, cannot resume.
If Youth is a kind of chamber piece—a quiet study in temporal suspension—La grande bellezza is its urban symphony, sprawling and cacophonous. Here, the city of Rome is not just a setting but a field of overlapping, colliding rhythms. The protagonist, Jep Gambardella, glides through the city’s pulse like a ghost: parties, funerals, botox appointments, avant-garde performance art, all stitched together in a looping sequence of spectacle and ennui. Rome, in Sorrentino’s vision, is both eternal and exhausted—its architectural grandeur a kind of rhythmic residue of lost meanings. The film’s opening sequence, with its sudden jump from a choir performance to a decadent rooftop party, immediately sets up the film’s dialectic between sacred and profane rhythms. What looks at first like eurhythmia—the layering of different temporalities—is quickly revealed to be a hollow choreography, one that Jep both participates in and silently critiques.
Jep’s rhythm, like Fred’s, is one of refusal. He is a flâneur without direction, drifting rather than progressing, attuned not to productivity but to sensation. Sorrentino’s camera mimics this languor, often circling or hovering, privileging mood over action. Like Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst, Jep is both observer and participant—caught within the social and spatial rhythms of his city, but also distanced from them, listening for a beat that never quite returns. The film is saturated with beautiful surfaces—rituals, performances, processions—but all of them feel like echoes. The past persists as form, but not as meaning. Rome becomes the site of what Lefebvre might call an arrhythmic beauty: structured, repetitive, but ultimately out of joint.
Across both films, Sorrentino renders rhythm not simply as an aesthetic device but as a mode of critique. These are works concerned with the bodily and social textures of time: the way repetition can sustain or drain, how rhythm can be both life-giving and death-dealing. Aging, in Sorrentino’s hands, is not just physical decline—it is a disruption of one’s capacity to inhabit rhythm. To grow old is to fall out of sync: with culture, with vitality, with the very mechanisms of meaning-making. Yet Sorrentino’s cinema doesn’t mourn this disruption so much as dwell in it, extending its temporality, letting us feel its strange, elegiac beauty.
What Sorrentino’s cinema ultimately offers to the critic is not a puzzle to decode, but a texture to inhabit—a kind of phenomenological rhythm that resists reductive explanation. To engage seriously with Youth and La grande bellezza is to move beyond questions of narrative or even theme, and instead to tune into the temporal architectures of the films themselves. In doing so, we begin to see criticism not only as interpretation, but as a rhythmic practice in its own right—an act of attunement, of watching with the body as much as the eye. Sorrentino invites us to listen closely: to beauty, to boredom, to silence, to time. The critic’s task, then, is not to resolve these rhythms, but to move with them—gracefully, attentively, and above all, in time.
