A film directed by Paolo Sorrentino, with Toni Servillo and Anna Bonaiuto (winner of the Prix du Jury, Cannes 2008).
Movie Presentation
Movie PresentationIL DIVOA film directed by Paolo Sorrentino, with Toni Servillo and Anna Bonaiuto (winner of the Prix du Jury, Cannes 2008). Il Divo begins with the 74-year-old prime minister Andreotti, in politics since 1946, forming his seventh and last Christian Democrat government. We're shown a montage of deaths of prominent people (something that will be repeated later on): assassinations and suicides using bombs, machine guns, pistols, strangulation. His government is introduced to the press and in a stunning sequence his cronies gather for a cabinet meeting. Each is identified on screen by a brief biography and his Cosa Nostra-style nickname and they reveal their characters through their dress and body language.We're shown Andreotti on one of his nocturnal perambulations, walking on the pavement as three cars crawl along beside him and armed police look warily around. He goes into a church to pray and meets a priest to whom he begins a confession. He's established as a remote, withdrawn figure, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, his ears pixie-like, his mask-like face showing few signs of emotion, his voice flat and expressionless. But his speech is clipped, his talk witty, aphoristic, guarded, at times gnomic.From this point, the film becomes increasingly fragmented and allusive, as Andreotti's career begins to unraveal among renewed accusations of corruption, conspiracy, murder, and association with the Mafia. He fails to be elected president by his fellow senators, is replaced as prime minister and faces numerous trials and tribunals from which he emerges, often on appeal, more or less exonerated, his hands clean only in the Teflon sense.Did he meet and exchange kisses with the capo di tutti capi Totò Riina in Sicily? Was he ultimately responsible for the murders of the banker and fellow mason Calvi, the judge Falcone, the kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro and many others? These questions are put to him publicly, in imaginary interrogations and in nightmares, and cleverly brushed aside. Andreotti does not admit responsibility but his extraordinary career raises central questions about how a man can hold office in a corrupt society and serve the interests of the state and its people without supping with the devil or arriving at compromises with evil, venal, antisocial people or at least those with different cultural and economic agendas.There are fascinating characters here, among them, on the distaff side, Andreotti's wife Livia, withdrawn but critical, who was by profession an archaeologist, his perceptive longtime secretary Vincenza Enea Gambogi, and a strange, uncredited performance as a diplomat's wife by the beautiful Fanny Ardant.They're elements of an intelligent, elegant movie, part thriller, part analysis of democratic politics, part introduction to the labyrinthine workings of Italian governance. There is much that will mystify foreign audiences, but this mystery cannot be separated from the intricate tapestry of a morally challenging, darkly comic and highly entertaining film. (The Observer) In Italian, with English subtitles. Thursday, December 12th 2013, at 19:00Italian Cultural Institute12 Meir Rutberg Street, Haifa