Divinely powerful

Paulo Sorrentino on Il Divo, his
exhilarating thriller about the disturbing
Italian politician Giulio Andreotti

ARACHNID ANDREOTTI: Servillo

by MARK SLUTSKY

A biopic of an Italian politician, intricately detailed with the minutiae of the country’s contorted politics of the last 40 or so years and full of obscure references and in-jokes, might not, it would seem, play too well outside of the country of its origin. But Italy’s politics are uniquely theatrical and violent, and Paulo Sorrentino’s Il Divo is a movie well-suited to its subject matter: an audacious recasting of political manoeuvrings as a darkly funny and fast-paced thriller. Soundtracked to musicians like Cassius, Trio and Barbara Morgenstern, it’s an amazingly entertaining and fast-paced film, even if you have no idea what you’re looking at most of the time.

Giulio Andreotti, the three-time Prime Minister of Italy (elected seven times to Parliament) is the film’s subject. He’s at once a master at hanging on to power and an admittedly not wildly intelligent man; a blank personality with a cynical sense of humour. His nicknames range from Divo Giulio (divine Giulio) to Belzebù (Beelzebub); Mafia ties have been alleged many times but never conclusively proven.

“For the Italian people Andreotti is very important, he’s a passion for the Italian people,” says Sorrentino, speaking to the Mirror at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “For some people he is the devil, for others he’s a saint. He’s very interesting to me too, so I wanted to make a film about him for many years. I was scared to make a work that would take so long, because I needed to research a lot about him and then I was scared I would spend a lot of time for a film that nobody would want to do.”

It wasn’t easy to finance the film, especially in a country where the government and the media have such a tortuous relationship. “He’s a man who was in power for 40 years,” Sorrentino says, “And when you stay in power for 40 years you have many, many relationships with everybody and many people are indebted to you.”

“He’s very ambiguous, very enigmatic,” Sorrentino continues. “To keep his power he needed to keep his secrets, too. He can’t speak about some things and for this reason he’s an enigma. He’s like Kissinger for the United States.”

Il Divo makes an interesting bookend with Matteo Garrone’s recent Gomorrah, which told a story of Italian crime and corruption from the ground up; Sorrentino’s film is told from the opposite perspective, the absolute heights of power. Interestingly, they share an actor in Toni Servillo, who played the sinister waste management stakeholder in Gomorrah. He’s almost unrecognizable as the hunched, arachnid Andreotti—it’s a performance strangely reminiscent of Boris Karloff.

“Somebody told me it was an exaggeration but I don’t think so,” Sorrentino says of the characterization. “He’s really that kind of person. His favourite film is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he’s not very far from Karloff! All of the characteristics of the way he walks and moves are his.”

Sorrentino says that Andreotti’s unabashed blankness inspired the movie’s vivid style. “My idea was that if I followed it simply, the character and the history, it would be a boring film,” he says. “Because he’s boring. Yes, he has a little humour, but he’s boring, he’s always static. In those years at the beginning of the ’90s when the film takes place, politics was really a war. So I preferred to make a sort of war movie—like a rock opera during a war.”

IL DIVO OPENS THIS FRIDAY, MAY 22