I ran across this spectacular review of Sorrentino’s recent Il divo, which much like Sokurov’s The Sun is a visually arresting psychological brief of a controversial political figure. I guess that is putting it too mildly, isn’t it. There is a formal anarchy to Il divo that outstrips Tarantino similar use of the same set of conventions, as it serves to evoke and undermine the terrible chaos of a corrupt system at the same time.
But, why write more about it. This review is very compelling:
Il divo is a cosmic tragedy – its protagonist casting a shadow so obviously reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard – and it rivals in ferocity some our best cinema di denuncia, from Rosi to Petri to Damiani, without yet matching its civil and moral outrage. In this it reflects I think the different historical moment, the sense of things universally known yet so effectively and complicitly removed from the collective consciousness. The problem for us has become how to sensitise ourselves again to the enormity of those offences, how to short-circuit the logic of listless acceptance of this truculent history of ours: flying cars, exploding trains, the enemies of the state silenced with bullets and strychnine-laced coffees, or left to swing under a bridge in London. Sorrentino treats it for what it is, a grotesque gallery of pulp fictions, compressed to fit the duration of the screening in a rapid-fire sequence that leaves little time to pity the victims. And perhaps that’s what it felt like to Giulio Andreotti, our seven times Prime Minister, twenty-eight times cabinet minister, who lived through it all and had to keep it all quiet.