The Great Beauty is film director Paolo Sorrentino’s great and evocative narrative on human life – its seeming insignificance and meaninglessness, its often unwarranted loveliness. Set almost entirely in Rome, it offers the viewer in scene after scene an almost overwhelming collage of gorgeous things: long views of the river in early morning, cascades of water playing with the Roman sun at a fountain on the Via Garibaldi, the intimate splendour of the Tempietto di Bramante, the regal and the private at Villa Medici. We see all of this through the eyes of Jepp Gambardella, a writer in constant search of inspiration, crippled – perhaps – by the very things that should act as stimulus and muse. Watching it again not so long ago, I was reminded of the extraordinary emptiness that sits at the heart of his dizzying decadence. One gets to the end of the film feeling that the life being reflected upon has been one of shadows – mere imitations, if you like, of the real thing – where the invitation to the real party seemingly never arrived.

In his call of the disciples, recounted in today’s gospel reading, Jesus sets down the true and total purpose of life in three words: ‘Come, follow me’. In this moment, he makes of all our moments invitations: that is, every moment from that moment bears his invitation. This is a summons into real life, where shadows are no longer mistaken for real things – where the fragments of our lives get pieced together in the story of redemption. This life has little down time – indeed, as Rowan Williams has put it, Christ has no free time! – but it is one where we can say with certainty that what is lost has been found, where what was scattered has been gathered, where what was deathly cold has put on shades of immortality. I will sing the wondrous story is not a hymn we sing at St Pancras, though you will recognise its tune. As its second verse reminds us, though ‘days of darkness still may meet me, sorrow’s path I oft may tread, / yet his presence still is with me, by his guiding hand I’m led’. More than this, ‘he will keep me ‘til the river rolls its water at my feet’, so that we might look with hope to the continuation of the song and the story with all the saints in glory, ‘gathered by the crystal sea’. You may listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPCFaE9GNI

Back to The Great Beauty. The film has the most inspired soundtrack of any recent film I have seen. Central to this is Vladimir Martynov’s hypnotic composition The Beatitudes, arranged here for string quartet. Inspired by American minimalism and Russian Orthodox chant, it is a wordless meditation on the words of Our Lord in the gospel of Matthew. Its repetitive nature never, to me, gets boring. If ever I hear it, I am taken straight to Rome – to a bridge over Tiber where rays of sunlight, refracted through the trees that line its bank, send the shadows flying. You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSBYE1ej1Aw