Although us Americans have yet to see his reportedly bizarre Sean Penn-starrer This Must Be the Place — even a year later, no release from The Weinstein Company is in sight — Paolo Sorrentino earned a whole lot of weight with his acclaimed 2009 picture, Il Divo, which helped establish his name on the international scene. My (overly-simple) point being: even if the movie where Penn dresses up like Robert Smith and tries to find a Nazi turned out to be terrible, we’d still be giving the fellow our time.

I, therefore, think it’d be wise to pay attention to a story in Variety, in which we learn he’s breaking ground on Great Beauty, an Italian feature that will reunite him with his Il Divo star, Toni Servillo; Sabrina Ferilli and Carlo Verdone will co-star. Although the specifics are not of access to ourselves, his Place co-writer, Umberto Contarello, has returned to Beauty, which is reported to focus on both “the city of Rome and its grotesque glamorous society and arts world underbelly.”

What does that even mean? I don’t know, but, as someone who’s seen the “grotesque glamorous society” of Rome firsthand, the capturing of such a world on film — and from a talented filmmaker, to boot — is something I’ll, by default, be fully interested in. Shooting on Great Beauty will begin in August; Indigo Film, Medusa, and Babe Films are all producing.

Is Sorrentino someone you keep tabs on? What do you take from Great Beauty so far?