Loro (18.)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
Starring Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio. Italian with subtitles. 151 mins.
This vision of late-era Bunga Bunga Berlusconi is giddy but solemn, with a lora lora naked flesh, a lora lora exquisitely shot tableaux, a lora lora speeches but not a lora point or insight. Like its subject, it never gives it to you straight and it is always taking liberties. And it uses sex to distract viewers from reality.
Silvio Berlusconi, the former MOR crooner turned Italian President, was more Trump than Trump, and probably he is the subject Sorrentino, Italy's most distinguished filmmaker for around a decade, has been building up to all his career. But the pressure of finally doing it seems to have utterly derailed him.
Excuses are gotten in early with an on-screen disclaimer effectively admitting that they will play fast and loose with the facts, make full use of their artistic license: "All is documented. All is Arbitrary." But why would you need your artistic licence for a film about Berlusconi, a man who spewed out amble rope with which to hang him?
The film takes Berlusconi on his own terms, as the Machiavellian manipulator. He's the great salesman who got Italy to buy into all his empty promises and somewhere along the line Sorrentino seems to have bought into them as well. To build him up he isn't seen for 45 minutes. Our road to him is through provincial entrepreneur pimp Sergio (Scarmarcio, perfectly cast as the embodiment of smarmy little boy venality) and his attempts to worm his way to the man known as “him, him?” This opening act is mounted in the fine Italian tradition of opulent decadent spectacle, Satyricon, Caligula, filled with carefully choreographed and rather prim orgy sequences. There is naked writhing flesh everywhere and the excited camera zooms in, zooms out, sweep across, cuts away but never to anything with as much as a hair out of place.
Most of the writhing stops when we get to grandfather Berl, who is played by a heavily made-up Servillo, Sorrentino's long term collaborator. The makeup is so heavy, so fixed, that Servillo's take on Berlusconi is like a film about a bank robber who wears a Richard Nixon Halloween mask all the way through. Servillo's Berlusconi mask though is more like a game show host Frankenstein and it doesn't really give him a lot to work with. He is too comic to be taken seriously.
Sorrentino made the masterly The Great Beauty and the underseen and underrated TV gem The Young Pope. He is an extraordinary film-maker but one you can never quite trust. Alongside his cameraman collaborator Luca Bigazzi, he creates images that seduce the eye but often leave you wondering if there anything of substance behind them. Previously he's always kept audiences on side but this is the film where all of Sorrentino's worst aspects are allowed to run free. It takes every little irritation or slight misgiving you had with his previous films and turns them into one great big act of garrulous hollowness.
His previous political film Il Divo, about 7-time Italian prime minister Andreotti, was a frantic Scorsesesque splurge of information and images, an opportunity to show off but one that did also try to address some serious issues. There was substance and spectacle, though you could bicker about the exact ratio. Here Berlusconi is just a chance for him to indulge himself try out each and every allegorical image and metaphor that comes to him. We start out with a sheep wandering into his villa, watching a mindless game show on TV and eventually dying when the air-conditioning is turned up. I don't know, maybe it is relevant. Or there is a scene with him randomly phoning someone up and trying to sell them some real estate. The meaning is clear but does it really show us anything? Sorrentino stages an elaborate scene of a rubbish cart crashing and garbage exploding into the air in Rome, seemingly for no other reason than to have a jump cut from the exploding rubbish to biscuits falling from the sky at a Bunga Bunga party in Sardinia. Now that's excess.
Sorrentino's approach is so heightened, so abstract it becomes pointless. When reality, in the shape of the L'Aquila earthquake, bursts into this exquisitely put together fantasy, it is vaguely obscene and shows up just how short-changed we have been by this film. Loro is such a procession of smoke and mirrors that it becomes a distraction from, rather than an examination of, Berlusconi's malicious hold over Italy. By the end, you almost start to like him. He brought out the worst in Italians and he's brought out the worst in Sorrentino.
And it's so frustrating and maddening. The bastard is right there in front of you and yet somehow the film fails to lay a glove on him.
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
Starring Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Euridice Axen, Fabrizio Bentivoglio. Italian with subtitles. 151 mins.
This vision of late-era Bunga Bunga Berlusconi is giddy but solemn, with a lora lora naked flesh, a lora lora exquisitely shot tableaux, a lora lora speeches but not a lora point or insight. Like its subject, it never gives it to you straight and it is always taking liberties. And it uses sex to distract viewers from reality.
Silvio Berlusconi, the former MOR crooner turned Italian President, was more Trump than Trump, and probably he is the subject Sorrentino, Italy's most distinguished filmmaker for around a decade, has been building up to all his career. But the pressure of finally doing it seems to have utterly derailed him.
Excuses are gotten in early with an on-screen disclaimer effectively admitting that they will play fast and loose with the facts, make full use of their artistic license: "All is documented. All is Arbitrary." But why would you need your artistic licence for a film about Berlusconi, a man who spewed out amble rope with which to hang him?
The film takes Berlusconi on his own terms, as the Machiavellian manipulator. He's the great salesman who got Italy to buy into all his empty promises and somewhere along the line Sorrentino seems to have bought into them as well. To build him up he isn't seen for 45 minutes. Our road to him is through provincial entrepreneur pimp Sergio (Scarmarcio, perfectly cast as the embodiment of smarmy little boy venality) and his attempts to worm his way to the man known as “him, him?” This opening act is mounted in the fine Italian tradition of opulent decadent spectacle, Satyricon, Caligula, filled with carefully choreographed and rather prim orgy sequences. There is naked writhing flesh everywhere and the excited camera zooms in, zooms out, sweep across, cuts away but never to anything with as much as a hair out of place.
Most of the writhing stops when we get to grandfather Berl, who is played by a heavily made-up Servillo, Sorrentino's long term collaborator. The makeup is so heavy, so fixed, that Servillo's take on Berlusconi is like a film about a bank robber who wears a Richard Nixon Halloween mask all the way through. Servillo's Berlusconi mask though is more like a game show host Frankenstein and it doesn't really give him a lot to work with. He is too comic to be taken seriously.
Sorrentino made the masterly The Great Beauty and the underseen and underrated TV gem The Young Pope. He is an extraordinary film-maker but one you can never quite trust. Alongside his cameraman collaborator Luca Bigazzi, he creates images that seduce the eye but often leave you wondering if there anything of substance behind them. Previously he's always kept audiences on side but this is the film where all of Sorrentino's worst aspects are allowed to run free. It takes every little irritation or slight misgiving you had with his previous films and turns them into one great big act of garrulous hollowness.
His previous political film Il Divo, about 7-time Italian prime minister Andreotti, was a frantic Scorsesesque splurge of information and images, an opportunity to show off but one that did also try to address some serious issues. There was substance and spectacle, though you could bicker about the exact ratio. Here Berlusconi is just a chance for him to indulge himself try out each and every allegorical image and metaphor that comes to him. We start out with a sheep wandering into his villa, watching a mindless game show on TV and eventually dying when the air-conditioning is turned up. I don't know, maybe it is relevant. Or there is a scene with him randomly phoning someone up and trying to sell them some real estate. The meaning is clear but does it really show us anything? Sorrentino stages an elaborate scene of a rubbish cart crashing and garbage exploding into the air in Rome, seemingly for no other reason than to have a jump cut from the exploding rubbish to biscuits falling from the sky at a Bunga Bunga party in Sardinia. Now that's excess.
Sorrentino's approach is so heightened, so abstract it becomes pointless. When reality, in the shape of the L'Aquila earthquake, bursts into this exquisitely put together fantasy, it is vaguely obscene and shows up just how short-changed we have been by this film. Loro is such a procession of smoke and mirrors that it becomes a distraction from, rather than an examination of, Berlusconi's malicious hold over Italy. By the end, you almost start to like him. He brought out the worst in Italians and he's brought out the worst in Sorrentino.
And it's so frustrating and maddening. The bastard is right there in front of you and yet somehow the film fails to lay a glove on him.
