Il Divo

On the strength of The Great Beauty (2013) and This Must Be the Place (2011), Paolo Sorrentino is one of the most interesting directors working today.  Il Divo (2008) is the film that first brought him to international attention.  I recall reading reviews in various periodicals, including The New Yorker, extolling the intelligence and graphic design of Il Divo.  But I also recall paying scant attention to those writings:  the subject of Sorrentino's film, labyrinthine corruption in the Italian government centered around the enigmatic figure of Giulio Andreotti, didn't particularly interest me and the scandals that the film interrogates seemed parochial to Italy, impossible to understand, and remote from American experience.  Unfortunately, it seems that my initial impression was inaccurate.  Il Divo is thrilling to look upon -- the film making craft evident in the picture is magnificent and almost every shot is compelling in one way or another.  But I found the film impossible to understand and emotionally baffling.  Toni Servillo, who is captivating in The Great Beauty, plays the role of the hunchbacked and grotesquely buttoned-down Andreotti.  He walks with tiny mincing steps, holds his back and shoulders rigid as an automaton, and sits motionlessly, hands clasped before him, like a cadaver at parties and conclaves of conspirators.  As imagined by Servillo, Andreotti speaks in a grating whisper and his words are either political sententia inflected by religious allusions or utterly banal.  Except for a propensity to have his political opponents (and, even, allies) murdered, Andreotti seems a man of utter virtue -- he is frequently seen praying in Church, never curses, and never threatens anyone.  The subtitles to the film describe him as a man accused of being a "mandator" for assassinations -- I have no idea what that term is supposed to mean and this incomprehension embodies the difficulties that I have with this movie.  Although I couldn't understand exactly what was happening in most scenes, I did perceive that the movie presents no affirmative evidence of any wrongful acts by Andreotti -- at most, he seems to have some sort of relationship with various components of the Italian mafia.  We see him kissing a figure that I construe to be a mafia chieftain at one point, but we don't ever see him conspiring with criminals to accomplish any evil acts.  The point of the film, I think, is that Andreotti, the so-called "hunchback" and "black pope", creates a toxic environment around him in which others scheme to commit murders.  This is dramatized by a discussion between Andreotti and bearded personage that I take to be a journalist:  Andreotti doesn't believe in chance and says on several occasions that everything is guided by the will of God; the journalist responds with a recitation of chance encounters and coincidences leading to a series of killings.  Then, he asks Andreotti if he wishes to amend his answer.  Characteristically, Andreotti is silent:  the film implies that Andreotti believes that these events were all "mandated" -- my word, but perhaps an explanation for the strange appellation "mandator" -- and that, in fact, his own political will is somehow equivalent to the will of God.  This seems confirmed by the single scene in the movie in which Andreotti speaks out and explains his motivations -- this is a sequence, filmed like Shakespearian soliloquy, in which Andreotti expresses, opaquely but with singular vehemence, the fact that he had to consort with criminals and, even, perhaps, involve himself in crimes, in order that the center of Italian politics, his Christian Democratic party, might prevail against extremists on both sides.  As part of this project, Andreotti seems to accuse himself of allowing Aldo Moro to be killed by the Red Brigade Faction, a murder that weighs heavily, it seems, on Andreotti's' conscience - the film reverts repeatedly to a glossy, surreal image of Moro in his cage awaiting murder by his captors.  Servillo's Andreotti is a remarkable creation -- he is like Richard Nixon at his darkest combined with Nosferatu.  The man has the face and ears of a goblin and his motivations are utterly obscure.  Power as wielded by Andreotti seems to be a wholly abstract concept -- there is no sense that this little, stiff goblin of a man enjoys the attributes of power or that he is personally corrupt in any way.  We have no sense that Andreotti enjoys any sort of perquisites of the power that he wields -- he is completely asexual, seen sometimes holding hands with his elderly wife while watching kitsch on TV (he can't watch most stations because of continuous reporting denouncing him); we have no sense that he has any appetite for money or luxury or anything palpable at all.  Andreotti as shown in the film is cold, cadaverous cipher.  Similarly, the figures surrounding him, and doing his bidding, don't seem corrupt in any obvious way -- there's little or no carousing in the picture and nothing that suggests that anyone is personally enriching themselves.  From time to time, we see shocking murders, but I couldn't figure out even who was being murdered or why -- the film labels its characters by red titles that appear next to the figures on the screen, but there are so many people involved and there interactions are so understated and mysterious that I literally couldn't understand what was happening.  I assume that the material that the film dramatizes is all intimately familiar to Italian audiences and that we are seeing something akin to the Watergate scandal, albeit enacted on the scale of Seneca with innumerable murders and suicides.  Presumably, Italians know the basic narrative and can follow the twists and turns that Sorrentino dramatizes.  Further complicating the viewer's task is the fact that Sorrentino presents his narrative in fragments that are scrambled according to chronology -- we keep seeing Andreotti creeping along a barren street at midnight surrounded by a coterie of armed men, all of them anxiously scanning buildings and rooftops for assassins.  After a few iterations of this scene, I realized that we were watching Andreotti in Palermo, but I have no idea where he was going or why he is surrounded by an armed guard -- it's my surmise that he is going for a stroll before, or during, the proceedings in Court in Sicily involving accusations of murder and complicity in mafia crimes.  But I don't know why the scene, which is visually extraordinary, is repeated again and again as a kind of temporal node in the film's narrative structure.  The movie doesn't progess in any way -- it's prismatically fragmented and we don't detect any change in Andreotti's character; he certainly doesn't get his comeuppance, nor is he punished in any way.  We have no real sense that any moral tendencies are stirred in him by any of the events that we witness -- indeed, the little apparition of evil seems to have no moral reservations about anything but, perhaps, the death of Moro.  The film's surface is extraordinary -- a series of luxurious and spotlessly clean interiors, dark chambers of power with sleek reflecting surfaces through the which the camera prowls, medieval churches and palaces, ancient arcades clogged with reporters taking photographs and shouting questions to Andreotti.  In the closing credits, I see that Sorrentino expresses gratitude to his great predecessor, Francesco Rosi.  The film resembles some of Rosi's political dramas, particularly Salvatore Giuliano (1962)  -- that film was exquisitely beautiful and gripping shot by shot, but without the commentary track I had no idea what was going on.  (And, unfortunately, Il Divo isn't equipped with a commentary; I expect that the film will be reissued in a Criterion DVD at some point -- The Great Beauty has already earned this kind of treatment -- and that with a commentary the film's excellence and subtlety will be revealed to non-Italian audiences.  At this stage, I am left to my own devices in researching Andreotti and the history presented in the film.)  It is interesting to know that Andreotti, who died in 2013, saw the picture, at first, lost his temper about the way that he was portrayed, but, then, said that he admired the movie and would have liked it better if "(he) had been paid a share of its profits."