Review - Il Divo, The Screen on the Green

The Volpe-Argento and I have been learning Italian since the beginning of the year, or anno as I now know it. The Volpe has been concentrating on grammar and construction and declensions, while I have mastered the art of ordering vino and mangiare. We hoped we would be able to put this knowledge to some use when we shimmied in to see Paulo Sorrentino's Il Divo at The Screen on the Green, most uncomfortable seats in filmdom, on Saturday. Unfortunately there wasn't a scene where President Giulio Andreotti, seven times premier of Italy, and his small child entered a trattoria and was asked whether he/she or they would prefer red or white vino, they ordered some spaghetti/meat/fish, then paid the bill and left. Questa e la vita! So once again the VA put on his glasses and launched into the world of the subtitle. Over the few years that we have been together his reluctance to read a film as well as watch it has receeded, in the beginning was the word and at the beginning he wouldn't go there, but now there is hardly a whisker's flicker if I suggest a movie not in the English language.


As we entered, one of the ushers was being asked to explain what Il Divo was about, she's probably still trying.


What it is, is fabulous, witty, highly intelligent film making with a mesmerising central performance by Toni Servillo channelling a bloodless Nosferatu by way of Peter Sellers in Vittorio de Sica's After The Fox.














What it is not, is easy to follow.

It covers Andreotti's life from his successful election win in the 1980s to his arrest and unconvincing aquittal for Mafia connected crimes in the 1990s. The time shifts are confusing and the constant introduction of many minor figures, all male and all unfamiliar faces, left us unsure of what story we were following at times. There seems to be a lot of bother over whether Andreotti kissed a man called Riina, a no-no when he's the head of the Mafia. And as to those subtitles, the VA wasn't the only one finding the reading to watching ratio a little challenging.

But the visual wit and the beauty of the cinematography makes your heart soar, the script is literate and it's humour as dry as apparently Andreotti was and is still, because the man that Sorrentino is persuasively implying was involved in numerous murders and supposed suicides is, at the age of 90 a senator for life.


It is said the character of Don Licio Lucchesi in The Godfather Part lll was based on our gnome- like leading man, which gives greater weight to the argument that Coppola's film was actually a documentary rather than a work of fiction.

Walking home my happy Volpe was explaining that proportional representation as a voting system was responsible for the fragmented nature of the Italian political landscape and resulted in a weak opposition to any Andreotti or Berlusconi that acquired power.

I will never look at the Liberal Party political broadcast in the same way again. Ciao