Il Divo

Il Divois a comic masterpiece about the most cunning politico of them all, writes DONALD CLARKE

NOBODY COULD deny that the films of Paolo Sorrentino drip with self-assured panache and surreal chutzpah. But both The Family Friendand The Consequences of Love, the Italian director's best- known features to date, did seem a little short on substance.

Watching the films was akin to attending a lengthy game of pass the parcel that ends with the final contestant staring disappointedly at one last ball of (exquisitely beautiful) wrapping paper. What? No present?

With the magnificent Il Divo, Sorrentino finally happens upon a subject worthy of his formidable talent. The film is, simultaneously, a savage excoriation and an ironic celebration of the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Loaded with broad gags and moments of gratuitous absurdity – why is an unmanned skateboard moving through the parliament? – this picture says serious things in the most delightfully peculiar of voices. Ten months after it won the Prix du Jury at Cannes, it already feels like one of the great political films.

Il Divobegins with a single image that neatly foreshadows what is to come. Andreotti, who, with his Christian Democratic colleagues, had some hand in ruling Italy for 44 troublesome years, has been suffering from migraine and has turned, in desperation, to acupuncture. Looking at this pale gargoyle, its head impaled by a hundred needles, the viewer fast becomes aware that he or she is wandering into unmapped territory.

Before enough time has passed to properly process that vision, Sorrentino spreads further confusion by marching out a cast of a thousand scoundrels and – using artful captions that float behind buildings and emerge from car doors – offering indigestibly comprehensive descriptions of their role in the debasement of Italian politics.

Even the most assiduous follower of European affairs will have trouble remembering who is supposed to have paid how much to whom. This is, one suspects, another of Sorrentino’s jokes. The political (ahem) spaghetti junction allows money to flow from corrupter to the corrupted with relative ease, but, in its brain-spinning disorder, it offers near impenetrable barriers to the investigator.

Hunch-backed and monotonic, looking like an Edward Gorey character animated by Tim Burton, Andreotti squats behind the confusion of names, defying the (often uninterested) authorities to drag him to justice.

This is a truly remarkable central performance by Toni Servillo. Whereas Silvio Berlusconi wears the brash self-possession of a carnival huckster, Servillo’s version of Andreotti wraps himself in an enigmatic passivity that, even when appearing before parliament, suggests he is too unassuming a man to bother with unearned wealth or unacknowledged influence.

Andreotti may be sinister, but he is, surely, sinister in the manner of the unmarried shopkeeper in the midlands town who glowers at children when they seek sponsorship for their charity hike. He’s not sinister like a master criminal. That is, of course, the key to this quasi-fictional Andreotti’s genius.

Focusing largely on the early 1990s, when certain bribery scandals became unavoidable, Sorrentino suggests that his anti-hero might have been, to paraphrase an expression common in Irish politics, the craftiest of them all. (Remember, Andreotti is still an Italian “senator for life”.) Eventually, Andreotti is forced to make a kind of confession and, in doing so, he digs out the fetid philosophical heart of the film.

A Machiavellian of the most unadulterated hue, Andreotti suggests that not only is a strain of evil unavoidable in politics, but that, to function effectively, democracy actually requires its servants to entertain wickedness.

Sorrentino's odd masterpiece is sufficiently in awe of its terrible subject to seriously entertain this grim analysis. At this point, it becomes clear that Il Divomay be among the scariest comedies you will ever see. It's also among the most curious – and not just because of that unexplained skateboard.

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino Starring Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Giulio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci 15A cert, lim release, 110 min  *****