IL DIVO, written and directed by Italy’s award-winning Paolo Sorrentino (The Consequences Of Love, The Family Friend), is an elegant, eloquent and intelligent movie, one of the year’s very best.
In this stylish, thought-provoking look at the career of long-reigning and controversial Italian politician, Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo), Sorrentino displays a pure control of visuals and employs an eclectic musical soundtrack in ways that echo similar tactics from Kubrick and Tarantino.
Sorrentino’s considerable wit and craft allow him to walk a fine line between the rights and the wrongs, the truth and the allegations, as Andreotti is implicated in a variety of criminal activities.
Despite repeated accusations of sinister Mafia connections, the seven-time Prime Minister is always acquitted of all charges.
Servillo, the director’s now regular star, in his shoulder-hunched stature and lidded-eye menace, seems to channel classic horror movie villains – from Max Schreck’s Nosferatu to Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster. But, at crucial times, the character’s humanity and moral dilemma cut through the physical mask, not least in scenes detailing Andreotti’s relationship with his long-loyal wife, Livia (Anna Bonaiuto).
From an opening montage of murder that rivals anything from Coppola or Scorsese, to a virtuoso courtroom finale, the talented Sorrentino demonstrates his considerable cinematic bravado while proving a “strange but true” phenomenon.
Veteran US film critic Roger Ebert, in his review of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, cut to the heart of it when he wrote: “The more specific a film is, the more universal it becomes.”
Instead of being “just a gay cowboy movie", Lee’s Oscar winner told its story with such intensity, such feeling, that it achieved an unexpectedly wide appeal.
Brokeback Mountain touched everyone, and anyone, Ebert argued – guys who “wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker”. The more the movie “understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone”.
Similarly, Sorrentino cuts through the welter of facts and figures specific to Andreotti to make each of us consider our own guilt or innocence, our own place in the world and – crucially – the company we keep.
When asked why he (did or didn’t, might or might not’ve) associated with (allegedly) criminal figures, Andreotti replies: “I can only choose a team from the squad available.”
He agrees we must all be wary of our associates, but points out that Jesus chose Judas among his disciples.
Of his own credentials for office, he says: “I know I am an average man but, looking around, I do not see any giant.”
And he adds: “I don’t believe in chance, I believe in the will of God.”
Sorrentino trawls through a mountain of information and dis-information, lies, damned lies and statistics, and convinces us of a specific but universal truth ...
Cinema.
Il Divo is available now on DVD