Italian Film in the Present Tense by Millicent Marcus;

Author:Millicent Marcus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Motion pictures – Italy – History – 21st century
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

This group has gathered to be photographed as members of Andreotti’s government upon his election to a seventh term as prime minister.

The film’s Giulio is not always motionless, however – with the curved shoulders of the hunchback but the straight lower spine of the martinet, he walks robotically forward or backward with hardly a sideways glance. These movements are structured within the choreography of another dance, one that plays a strategic part in the corporeal dimension of Sorrentino’s satire: the tightly constrained steps of Giulio’s early morning constitutional down Via del Corso, surrounded by a police escort whose gait is closely matched with the prime minister’s own. Not to be overlooked is the musical score to which this dance is performed – the hymn-like melody of Fauré’s Pavane pour Orchestra Op. 50, accompanied by a chorus of celestial sweetness that elevates this ritual to the level of a religious procession, as if Giulio were the icon to be paraded through the streets on his saint’s day.7

The quietness of this scene, along with all of those set in Giulio’s household, is played off against the frenzied busyness and kinetic energy that his presence seems to trigger in others. Activity swirls around him – he is the calm within the vortex of public affairs that stretch from 1992 to 1996, and it is in this ironic counterpoint that Sorrentino confronts the enigma at the core of his protagonist’s career: to what can we attribute this unprepossessing character’s inordinate power and influence over the political life of his country?

Sorrentino’s film, I would argue, is nothing more than an enactment of that question at the level of form. Il Divo’s cinematic ingenuity – its ability to commandeer such a plenitude of signs at the service of Andreottian representation – works as an analogy to the power mechanisms put in place by the story’s own protagonist. The film’s stylistic virtuosity – its flamboyant camerawork, performative excess, over-the-top musical score, obtrusive editing, theatrical lighting, dazzling set design – call such attention to Il Divo’s formal surface that its object of representation ceases to be Andreotti himself, and becomes instead the imaginative processes set in motion by the very idea of representing Andreotti on screen. It’s as if Sorrentino were saying, “Watch me think cinematically about Andreotti, look what the medium-specific language of film allows me to say about him,” and conversely, “Look at how Andreotti pushes me to expand my own powers of cinematic inventiveness.”

Sorrentino’s struggle to forge an adequate representational approach to Andreotti parallels the attempts of the characters within the film to overcome the protagonist’s steely reserve. “I have to tell you that I will never understand you. I don’t know you,” sighs Vincenzo Scotti, the minister of the interior whose report on Salvo Lima’s murder is met by Giulio’s bizarre riff on his cousin Teresa’s hypochondria. Franco Evangelisti, Giulio’s devoted right-hand man, offers his boss a gift only to be greeted with an ingratitude verging on cruelty. Livia, Giulio’s strong and sympathetic wife,

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