IL DIVO (Italy/France, 2008)
Wednesday, 14th October 2009

Italy has had its fair share of great film-makers from De Sica to Fellini, from Rossellini to Antonioni and from Visconti to Pasolini. This is not merely an historical tradition however and in recent years many critics have found in the writer/director Paolo Sorrentino someone whom they regard as being a worthy successor. He was born in Naples in 1970 and in 2001 he made his first feature film, One Man Up, which was selected for screening at the Venice Film Festival. Nevertheless, the two films which truly brought him into the international spotlight were The Consequences of Love (2004) and The Family Friend (2006). I saw both and could recognise in Sorrentino an ambitious film-maker who was a true auteur, someone whose movies had a style of their own and displayed a strong cinematic sense. At the same time, certain aspects of both films left me not wholly satisfied and, in my eyes at least, while the talent was there, Sorrentino did not strike me as a man likely to make a masterpiece. Well, I was wrong, because I believe that his fourth feature, Il Divo, is just that.
It is, however, necessary to point out that Il Divo is more than just a triumph for the man who conceived it. It is no less a triumph for his leading actor, Toni Servillo, for the film is unimaginable without him. He too comes from around Naples but is the older man having been born there in 1959. He has made a career both as an actor and as a director, on stage as well as on screen, and his work in the theatre extends to directing opera. His film portrayals now cover work for six directors, but for Sorrentino he has appeared three times, first in One Man Up which was not seen here, then to splendid effect in The Circumstances of Love (any doubts I had about that film were unrelated to the acting in it) and now in Il Divo which is his crowning achievement to date. Indeed, Servillo’s performance here is the best that I have seen this year and that means that the first half of our 2009/10 season is unusually strong on the acting front (I am thinking here of Peter O’Toole in Dean Spanley, Servillo in Il Divo and, next up, Sir Ben Kingsley in Elegy).
To my mind the essential achievement of Il Divo is that it provides the most telling portrait that I have ever seen in the cinema of a certain aspect of the Italian character, one that is epitomised by that country’s power structures that are built on links between politicians, churchmen, hitmen and the Mafia. We know all too well that corruption thrives in the circles of power elsewhere, but this particular blend and the fact that it seems inbuilt is arguably unique to Italy. In seeking to explore this area, Sorrentino puts his focus on the controversial figure of Giulio Andriotti, the role played by Servillo. Andreotti presided over no less than seven governments between 1972 and 1992 and, although born as long ago as 14th January 1919, is still alive today. A man who cultivated a facade that was deliberately opaque and unrevealing, he is the centre of this film and the perfect figure to express what Sorrentino wants to say. It needs to be stressed however that this is no standard bio-pic following the later part of Andreotti’s career even though the main events portrayed here took place in the 1990s (there are in fact some flashbacks to earlier incidents while written titles at the close bring us more or less up to date). The course that Sorrentino takes is a very different one.
Sorrentino has said that he is well aware of the work of other Italian directors who have made films dealing with political issues. Not least he is an admirer of Francesco Rosi who made such masterpieces as Salvatore Giuliano and The Mattei Affair and it was the fact that he felt that such work could on its own terms never be equalled that encouraged Sorrentino to find a totally fresh approach. What this means is that he has eschewed naturalism in favour of a highly stylised presentation which, often leaving realism behind, nevertheless seems to reveal important truths about Italy. I think that it’s true to say that most audiences tend to prefer films that adopt a straightforward, naturalistic approach to narrative and this could mean that, for all its qualities, Il Divo may not be a film to appeal to all (although connoisseurs of great acting can hardly fail to be impressed by Servillo).
Even so, I have to say that I believe that Il Divo would have been an even more demanding film had its approach been more conventional. At the outset one is given a glossary which comments on such bodies as the Red Brigade, the Christian Democrat Party and the P2 Lodge. This is meant to be helpful, but one’s reaction may well be that there is so much information here that one will never be able to remember it all and, indeed, there have been other recent films from Italy (My Brother Is An Only Child is one that comes to mind) where one was left with the sense that those without detailed knowledge of political events in Italy were at a definite disadvantage. Again and again one finds scenes in Il Divo that reconstruct actual events and name the people involved, the date and the place. But what needs to be grasped is that these are not details you have to remember so much as footnotes that would enable anyone so inclined to check up on the historical accuracy of what is being depicted. What really counts for the general viewer is that we see the interaction between politicians, members of the Catholic Church and the criminal fraternity and it is the mix that matters rather than remembering individual identities. The stylisation adopted allows for true cinematic panache and the images here in colour and ‘Scope are terrific extending at times into the surreal. Hardly less striking is the music used, both Teho Teardo’s original score and the music of classical composers (among them Sibelius, Fauré, Vivaldi and Saint-Saëns) around which certain sequences are constructed. Look for a single adjective to describe the style of Il Divo and the word that suggests itself is impressionistic, yet what is so important, as I have already suggested, is that beneath this bold surface we sense that truth is being told.
(See "Cont")
Programme Note by Mansel Stimpson.