Il Divo (15.)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
Starring Toni Servillo, Anna Boniaiuto, Guilio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci, Fanny Ardant. Italian with subtitles. 117 mins.
This film about seven-time Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti outlines a period of its country’s history marked by uncertainty and corruption, yet the film bowls onto the screen with a swagger and confidence that few films can match. It opens in a flurry of startling images and information, bombarding the audience and daring them to try and keep up. It’s like an extended Scorsese montage, the confidence of his camerawork and his music choices mark out Sorrentino (The Family Friend, The Consequences of Love) as a creature of pure cinema.
You wait for the moment when the film will slow down and give some order to the images but it never does. It’s like watching a 24 hour news channel that keeps drumming up headlines but never gets round to the stories behind them; it just gives you more headlines.
The still centre of this whirlwind of assassination and intrigue is Andreotti. Cold, inhuman, effete, droll, bland, hunchbacked, cunning and utterly inscrutable, Andreotti appears to be just enough things to just enough men to always retain power.
Servillo’s central performance is unclassifiable. He’s like a cross between Nosferatu, Geoffrey Howe and Leslie Crowther; George Smiley trapped inside the body of Dana Carvey’s Ross Perot impersonation. His Andreotti looks like a shallow comic caricature – always wearing these large framed glasses that bend the top of his ears out - but still suggests the almost unfathomable depths lurking within this man that can’t be touched, who claims he possesses “a vast archive instead of an imagination.”
The film is set in the nineties but events are forever weighed down by the sins of the previous two decades - the political violence, the kidnap and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade, “God’s banker” Roberto Calvi found hung under Westminster Bridge and the easy coexistence of the mafia, government and Masonic lodge.
It’s such a bold and forceful piece of film making that you really want to be swept along with it but having had two cracks at it I feel that unless you are Italian or very familiar with the period than it is probably all a bit too much. At times the screen is so filled with writing that you are reading the translation of a caption introducing a new character before trying to catch the subtitles of some dialogue. At the same time you are trying to piece how all this fits together, or rather which bits are part of the puzzle and which are just for show.
It’s ultimately unsatisfying but maybe that is appropriate. For all its weight of history this is a vision of politics as unrelenting present tense; probably Italian political life is so convoluted and riddled by intrigue that there is no bigger picture, and nobody, not even Andreotti, knows where all the bodies are buried.
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
Starring Toni Servillo, Anna Boniaiuto, Guilio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci, Fanny Ardant. Italian with subtitles. 117 mins.
This film about seven-time Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti outlines a period of its country’s history marked by uncertainty and corruption, yet the film bowls onto the screen with a swagger and confidence that few films can match. It opens in a flurry of startling images and information, bombarding the audience and daring them to try and keep up. It’s like an extended Scorsese montage, the confidence of his camerawork and his music choices mark out Sorrentino (The Family Friend, The Consequences of Love) as a creature of pure cinema.
You wait for the moment when the film will slow down and give some order to the images but it never does. It’s like watching a 24 hour news channel that keeps drumming up headlines but never gets round to the stories behind them; it just gives you more headlines.
The still centre of this whirlwind of assassination and intrigue is Andreotti. Cold, inhuman, effete, droll, bland, hunchbacked, cunning and utterly inscrutable, Andreotti appears to be just enough things to just enough men to always retain power.
Servillo’s central performance is unclassifiable. He’s like a cross between Nosferatu, Geoffrey Howe and Leslie Crowther; George Smiley trapped inside the body of Dana Carvey’s Ross Perot impersonation. His Andreotti looks like a shallow comic caricature – always wearing these large framed glasses that bend the top of his ears out - but still suggests the almost unfathomable depths lurking within this man that can’t be touched, who claims he possesses “a vast archive instead of an imagination.”
The film is set in the nineties but events are forever weighed down by the sins of the previous two decades - the political violence, the kidnap and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade, “God’s banker” Roberto Calvi found hung under Westminster Bridge and the easy coexistence of the mafia, government and Masonic lodge.
It’s such a bold and forceful piece of film making that you really want to be swept along with it but having had two cracks at it I feel that unless you are Italian or very familiar with the period than it is probably all a bit too much. At times the screen is so filled with writing that you are reading the translation of a caption introducing a new character before trying to catch the subtitles of some dialogue. At the same time you are trying to piece how all this fits together, or rather which bits are part of the puzzle and which are just for show.
It’s ultimately unsatisfying but maybe that is appropriate. For all its weight of history this is a vision of politics as unrelenting present tense; probably Italian political life is so convoluted and riddled by intrigue that there is no bigger picture, and nobody, not even Andreotti, knows where all the bodies are buried.
