Loro

Loro is Paolo Sorrentino's film depicting the waning years of Sylvio Berlusconi, a media mogul on the order of Rupert Murdoch (or for that matter Donald Trump) who dominated Italian politics for several decades.  The movie seems set in a perpetual, hallucinatory present and so it's hard to measure the passage of time in the film -- however, it appears to me that, at least, five to ten years are chronicled.  The movie can be divided into three broad episodes, although it is visually and thematically exceptionally complex.  In many respects, the film seems similar to Sorrentino's astonishing The Great Beauty -- a powerful, intelligent man succumbs to the blandishments of his own charisma, the perpetual orgiastic parties and sexual temptations, and, at last, discovers that he has not accomplished those things to which he aspired.  The Great Beauty is more refined and melancholy -- the hero in that film is an intellectual, the author of one slim, but much-praised book.  As the film progresses, he discerns that the very beauty that he has sought to celebrate in his art has, perhaps, distracted him achieving the excellence to which he once aspired. "The Great Beauty" is, probably, the splendors of baroque Rome and not merely sexual temptation, although there is plenty of that, as well, in Sorrentino's earlier film -- therefore, the waste of the protagonist's life seems more tragic:  one beautiful thing has displaced another thing that was, perhaps, even more beautiful if it had been achieved.  Berlusconi was a clown and a womanizer on a colossal scale; therefore his failure, if it can be so described, is more squalid and less resonant.  Although Loro is a spectacular film, wildly inventive visually and pictorially stunning to the point of visual surfeit, the stakes are a lot lower -- men are often destroyed by womanizing and Berlusconi's lust, although dramatized with surrealistic (that is Fellini-esque exuberance) seems somehow less consequential than the fate that befalls the hero of The Great Beauty.  Furthermore, I think it's valid to ask why Sorrentino has essentially made two films about the same subject -- that is, the distractions of beauty (or the flesh) that lead a powerful and charismatic man to ultimately conclude that he has wasted his life.  It's a rich enough theme, but Sorrentino, to my eye, exhausted the subject in The Great Beauty and Loro, although a feast for the eyes, is less affecting and, ultimately, adds little to the director's exploration of this subject.

I noted that the film can be divided into three broad sections:  the first involves a glorified pimp, the handsome but reptilian Sergio Morra who connives to worm his way into Berlusconi's inner circle. This portion of the film proceeds by indirection -- Berlusconi does not appear in the movie until about a half-hour has lapsed and the first part of the film depicts Morra, disdained by his virtuous hard-working father, essentially procuring show-girls to barter to Berlusconi for favors.  In the next lengthy episode, we see Sylvio out of power on the island of Sardinia, conniving for a return to office -- he seduces six senators to become political allies ultimately and, at last, Morra is able to host a party for Berlusconi involving dozens of beautiful young women offered as bait to the 70-year old politician.  (The scheme fails because Berlusconi is losing his sexual appetite and the 20 year old girl that he tries to seduce rebuffs him in a humiliating way.  After the second part of the film, Morra, who is the protagonist in the first hour, more or less, simply drops out of the movie -- we see him in a single shot near the end of the movie, apparently ruined, watching TV with his righteous father.)  In the last third of the movie Berlusconi returns to Rome in triumph, forms a government, but, then, suffers a calamitous collapse of his marriage to the long-suffering and beautiful, Veronica (she is twenty years younger than Berlusconi).   The politician recognizes his mortality and the film ends with a bravura sequence at the site of village destroyed by an earthquake -- in a long steadi-cam shot invoking La Dolce Vita, the broken figure of Christ is lifted by crane out of a ruined church and reverently set on a red velvet bier; the movie ends with the sound of the sea as the camera patrols the ranks of firefighters and rescue workers involved in salvaging the wood-carved  Christ from the smashed church.  They all look benumbed. 

The film is quite long (about 2 and 1/2 hours) and sumptuously produced.  Aspects of the movie were opaque to me:  an opening scene involving a sheep that wanders into Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia and, then, apparently freezes to death in the blast of air-conditioning in the house baffled me completely although the sequence is brilliantly shot.  The film's first image, the sheep staring into the camera, represents, I suppose, the "flock" of Italians who succumbed to Berlusconi's charm.  But the cross-cutting between the animal and the air conditioning vents was confusing to me -- why would Berlusconi have his house air-conditioned to 1 degree centigrade?  Some sequences are fantastically brilliant:  as a posse of fashion-models and show-girls walks with Sergio Morra to one of his parties, a rat scuttles across the street.  The garbage truck driver tries to avoid squashing the rat, loses control of his truck which crashes spectacularly through the railing overlooking the Roman forum, falling among the ancient columns and arcades.  The truck explodes and a huge cloud of garbage is flung into the air where its motion is slowed into a pirouette of empty wine bottles and brightly colored wrapping paper.  Suddenly, this debris turns into multi-colored pills and tablets which fall like rain onto a pool-party at Morra's Sardinian villa opposite Berlusconi's estate.  The pills are Ecstasy apparently and the several score of party-goers, all scantily clad and with beautiful bodies, strip off the rest of their clothing and dance together in a lascivious and frenzied way -- ultimately everyone is exhausted and collapses to the deck of the pool and we see those few party-goers still capable of standing watching with obsessive melancholy as a sole sailboat cruises the sunset-lit bays and coves of the island.  There are many stand-out sequences of this sort, but, in the end, the film's moral thesis is that all this Dionysian partying is essentially meaningless, bereft of value and ethically bankrupt.  The problem in a film decrying this sort of excess is the same problem that haunts most war films -- movies are always anti-war but can't avoid the sneaky pictorial glamour of the subject:  explosions and vast columns of men marching under military banners are a spectacular subject for the camera; so similarly, dozens of almost naked women with idealized bodies gyrating on a stage under throbbing laser light is a thing wonderful to behold:  it's pretty hard for us to remember that we are supposed to be disapproving of these spectacles, particularly when Sorrentino choreographs the action to pounding rock and roll.  Tonio Servillo, Sorrentino's surrogate, is, as always, wonderful.  When we first see him, he is caparisoned (for some unknown reason) like a harem girl and, behind the veil, his face is garishly painted -- he's supposed to look like a whore.  (His wife is disgusted by the display).  Servillo's performance is sometimes suave and unctuous, on other occasions buffoonish -- obviously Berlusconi is a brilliant man but his career seems based on absurdly lascivious parties in which he plays the clown.  On his premises, he has a volcano that he can program to erupt -- it's about 15 feet high -- and, also, a carousel.  Both of these props are heavily symbolic and deployed as emblems for paralysis (when the carousel is stopped) and for Berlusconi's besieged sexual capacities.  The film's last half-hour involves a bravura sequence showing an earthquake ravaging a small town at night, L'Aquilo, the movie tells us, and, then, a really savage war of words between the old man and his wife -- she denounces him as a clown and chauvinist pig.  But Berlusconi very shrewdly keeps asking her why she has stayed with him so many years -- in the end, she confesses that it is "because I still love you."  The scene in which the aging politician is rejected by a 20-year old girl is painful to watch -- the girl is in a coral pink room where Berlusconi hopes to seduce her.  Outside the party continues with beautiful show-girls dancing naked on a stage.  Berlusconi has his sights set on the one girl who feels herself duty-bound to reject his advances.  It's this scene that sets the "dying fall" melancholy characterizes the ending of the movie.  There are several odd scenes that I didn't understand -- Berlusconi seems to interview himself as a younger man; I presume we are seeing Berlusconi's younger brother but this episode was puzzling to me.  It's hard to say exactly what the film is about.  The movie doesn't emphasize Berlusconi's politics -- all we know is that he is anti-communist -- presumably because Italians would know all about this aspect of the protagonist's life.  We don't know what Berlusconi stands for other than particularly garish and scenic forms of sexual exploitation.  In a broader sense, aspects of the movie suggest Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  If he is nothing else, Berlusconi is imagined to be the consummate salesman.  In one static, but gripping scene, the politician calls a woman whom he has picked out of the phone book at random -- he cajoles her into buying an apartment from him (I think the politician began selling real estate).  When he closes the deal, something that he later acknowledges to be purely imaginary, he says:  "I can sell you anything because I know how it all comes out.  I know the script of life."  This scene rhymes with a sequence much later in the movie in which Berlusconi has built "seismic-free" apartment buildings for the people of the town ravaged by the earthquake.  He gives an old woman a pair of dentures -- she lost her teeth fleeing her collapsing home.  Then, he announces to her (as he did to the woman on the phone) the living room will be about 24 feet long, "long enough for me to stretch out my 5 foot six inch frame about five times."  The point is that he establishes the measure  and scale of the world over which he rules.  The nasty little pimp, Sergio Morra, is simply a smaller, less grandiose, version than his master, the big boss Sylvio Berlusconi.