Review: Il Divo (5/5)

Il Divo
(Paolo Sorrentino):
Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degli Esposti, Paolo Graziosi, Giulio Bosetti
Running time: 110 minutes (15A)

The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has arrived. His new film Il Divo is a pyroclastic surge of brilliance: a political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. It’s a film imbued with such mystery and wonder, you would think Pasolini had returned for a study, perhaps, of the Holy Ghost. Instead, Il Divo’s subject is about something even more mysterious and less tangible – the controversial seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Here’s a politician who would not just slip one over the Holy Spirit, but send Machiavelli sobbing into his goblet.
Andreotti, played here by Toni Servillo, is part Montgomery Burns, part Nosferatu: a hobbled, small man with heavy-lidded eyes and the deceptive hands-clasped demeanour of a saint. The film covers the period from his seventh election as prime minister in 1992 and takes us up to the trial where he fought allegations of Mafia connections. In between, it’s a stew of intrigue, suicides, murders and all manner of political dark arts. Andreotti has his hand in all of it and none of it. In one of the film’s many unexplained, tantalising sequences, the politician sits in a state car while the door handles won’t work. Torrential rain pours down. Police officers struggle to pry the door open, while the prime minister sits inside oblivious. In Il Divo, as in real life, Andreotti is a figure nobody can get at. Unlike the Hollywood biopic, Paolo Sorrentino has made a film about Andreotti’s very unknowableness.
The film’s title comes from an expression used to describe Julius Caesar – Divo Giulio, or divine Julius. And Sorrentino conjures something of the dissolute Roman empire among his modern-day Italian senators. It’s a gilded world of stately buildings and corrupt, balding, grey men. This is the kind of environment that would sink a lesser filmmaker with dead weight. But Sorrentino, who also wrote the screenplay, invests everything with such arresting vitality, playfulness and wit that the picture hums with life. He introduces Andreotti’s inner faction like they were Reservoir Dogs: the camera swoons over their slow-mo swagger while their nicknames such as The Lemon or The Shark slink onto the screen.
Sometimes you wonder if Sorrentino is the bastard child of Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellino. He marries Fellini’s unrestrained exuberance with Scorsese’s flair for gangster poetry and inspirational soundtrack. Certainly, this is the most exciting use of music since last year’s There Will Be Blood. Even the story’s inter-titles cannot sit still – they come at you in blood red from upside down (to accompany a hanging man) or slip out from the backs of buildings. (Sorrentino, meanwhile, is happy to acknowledge his debt to Scorsese with a recurring motif of Andreotti’s fizzing glass of painkillers; it’s a shot borrowed from Taxi Driver.) And yet, Sorrentino’s dynamic restlessness is very much his own.
Before we meet Andreotti, the film fires your adrenalin with a cross-cutting series of assassinations sliced together with an angular guitar track. Men are gunned down and a car falls slowly from the sky with strange poetry. The sequence make you want to dance. Later, you watch a man fall from a tall building all the way down onto the camera. The sequence makes you want to dive for cover.
And then there is a moment that is divine: a long take with a roaming camera that worms its way through a private party at the finance minister’s house. It enters a room, glides past tribal drummers and dancing women, glides into another room, where Andreotti sits like an emperor with his wife, a line of men queuing up to meet him, and a gallery of people standing in a sort of awe. Andreotti leaves swarmed by security, and the camera, still travelling, circles back into the other room, following the back of the finance minister who enters with his hands in the air, dancing. Wow. Everything about this world is contained within this one shot: the power, the secrecy, the decadence, and Andreotti’s almost saintly aloofness. He’s there and yet he’s not there.
Il Divo makes Sorrentino’s previous films look like a dry run. Those movies showed a fascination for men entombed in silence within a world of Mafia vice. Yet both The Consequences of Love (which starred Servillo) and The Family Friend were almost needlessly baroque. Here, form and content lock together in perfect unison. The camera swoops, sweeps and swirls through this ornate universe, soaking up the corridors of power. It travels towards Andreotti restlessly from a hundred different angles. It examines the pores in his face. Yet we come away knowing nothing about him while suspecting everything. It’s a remarkable performance from Toni Servillo. His face is a granite slab; his ears like something that went wrong in pottery class. He builds into his character a limitless fascination, a man whose body language evokes a kind of virtue yet whose inscrutable mind is as cunning as The Prince.
Like its subject, Il Divo is an elusive animal. It creates its own storytelling rules, and is imbued with something most great films have – the quality of strangeness.
A masterpiece.