Il Divo by Paolo Sorrentino

Il Divo, by Paolo Sorrentino.
Winner of the Jury Prize - Cannes Film Festival
110 mins. In Italian with English subtitles


Summary:

If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, language is inadequate to describe the chaos of Italian politics. Neither can words do justice to Italy’s most controversial and most criminally accused politician, the 25-times Christian Democrat minister and seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti. He is a man of many nicknames but you only have to remember one—“Il Divo.”

But where words fail, cinema can triumph. Take this latest dynamic movie from Italian cinema’s brightest new talent, Paolo Sorrentino, the 38-year-old director responsible for such arthouse hits as ‘The Consequences of Love’ and ‘The Family Friend’. In the same way that Matteo Garrone’s recent exposé, ‘Gomorrah’, caught the realities of the Neapolitan mafia, ‘Il Divo’ aims its hooks at the stinking big fish who slither through the marble palaces of power in Rome.

‘He’s ambiguous,’ insists Sorrentino of the still-active 90-year-old politician. He certainly is. Either through opportunism, psychological acuity or the ruthless exercise of power, this superficially retiring man – played in the film like a ‘secular cardinal’ by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo – has proved himself a great survivor. He has occupied office almost continuously since 1946. Throughout those years, he has been arraigned and charged often – notably for his involvement in political murder and his connections to the Mafia. But nothing has stuck.

However, Sorrentino’s images stick: he employs a startling visual armoury. He demolishes his quarry from all angles, invading the hunchbacked hypochondriac’s private space and attacking the public machinations of P2 (Propaganda Due), the notorious anti-communist secret lodge. You could say Sorrentino’s film is an investigation and trial by montage. With this cinematic assault, he consciously follows the great tradition of political filmmakers such as Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri..

Alongside the political affinities with Rosi, Petri et al, ‘Il Divo’ fires connections to the psychosexual concerns of Bertolucci and others from Italian cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. Through Sorrentino’s keen awareness of filmic space, architectural context and narrative fragmentation, the film also nods to the more abstract Antonioni.

Italian cinema, after languishing in the doldrums for the past decade or so, is experiencing a reinvigoration with a bolder political agenda.

‘Il Divo’ is a great biopic, which not only applies a stylish and absorbing new approach to political portraiture but goes some way to expressing Sorrentino’s aim of ‘assimilating the uncertainties and doubts of the Italian people’ at a crucial time in their history.