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Derek Malcolm's rating
Il Divo is extraordinary summation of Andreotti
By
Derek Malcolm
19 Mar 2009
No more imaginatively shot and directed film has reached us from Italy in recent years than Paolo Sorrentino’s extraordinary summation of the career of Giulio Andreotti. A member of the Italian parliament since 1946 and Prime Minister of Italy for separate terms, he is the country’s most persistently successful politician, constantly accused of corruption but still free today.
There is a caveat that comes with my praise. Despite the copious explanatory subtitles, which provide names and one-line CVs for the long list of participants, it is still difficult to get a grip on the complexities of post-war Italian politics.
Yet if Il Divo confuses at times, it has a brave, bravura style that’s very watchable and an astonishing performance from Toni Servillo as the shrouded, Machiavellian Andreotti, who pursues his long-lasting career with a face that gives nothing away and a conscience that is only shown in confessional asides to his priest. He doesn’t even tell his wife (Anna Bonaiuto) his innermost thoughts about his career.
The action begins in the Rome of the early Nineties when the veteran Andreotti forms his seventh administration as Prime Minister. He remembers with regret the assassinations of former chief minister Aldo Moro and many other friends and colleagues. But his government soon falls when Mafia links to his Christian Democrat party are exposed. Inspired by close associates, including a prominent cardinal, he attempts to become President but is heavily defeated. He remains unscathed when a famous anti-Mafia judge is murdered. But when there are more murders and suicides, allowing connections to be made between Andreotti, the political establishment, the Vatican and the Mafia, he is finally put on trial.
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Despite being accused of exchanging respectful kisses with Mafia capo Toto Riina, he denies any link, explaining that his strategy was to create “political tension” that would allow the Christian Democrats, and himself, to maintain power for so long.
Sorrentino goes no further than that. He is not attempting to interpret the man but to show that he was, and is, a virtually impenetrable enigma, corrupt or not.
This is a memorable film in the way it is made and the method with which the director pursues his investigation. It is a worthy follow-up to the impressive The Family Friend and The Consequences of Love, both of which deal with the criminality that seems to suffuse Italy from top to bottom.
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Reader views (1)
All over Europe we have Giulio Andreottis; ;they may not all walk like penguins, nor are they the same old Biblical dictators of the past, as were Franco, Muzzolini (atheistically Biblical), Hitler , De Valera, etc..; they now occupy a profile inkeeping with the Francesco Carotta-theory of the Papacy.
According to Francesco Carotta, Jesus is just some kind of joke behind which the most vile power-mongers in the world gather in Rome to subvert the secular state and govern the entire world through subterfuge, concordets, lies, wars, scandals and Papal control. Of course, Carotta does not go this far: he merely points out that there was no Jesus -- Correction: there was no person named JESUS, but there was the memory of the warrior Julius Caesar, around which the Romans rallied, and concerning which the cabal in Rome made a fabulous Mythos to advance their cause of world government.
Since the Mexican Constitutiion of 1917, when the communistic land refromers -- the first to see what Carotta saw -- clipped the overexpansive and ambitious advances of the Christian conquest, essentially by confining the clergy to baracks and refusing to allow them to disseminate the mythos on the streets, institutions and organizations of Mexico. Since then , the Cathollic Church replied with open warfare agaiinst the civil government. They carried the Cristeros War back to Spain, where it became better known as the Spanish Civil War and , with the help of other Catholic countries, WW11.
- Seamus Breathnach, Dublin, Ireland, 25/03/2009 12:07
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