Orson Welles once described Harry Lime, his character in The Third Man (1949), as the greatest star part ever written. “It’s where they talk about you for an hour and then you appear,” he explained to friend and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich.
It took 70 years, but Welles’s Lime has a challenge for star-part supremacy in Toni Servillo’s Silvio Berlusconi — the center of gravity, both sun and black hole, of Paolo Sorrentino’s (The Great Beauty, The Young Pope) new film, Loro, an outrageously sordid and frustratingly uneven dramatization of an Italy in thrall of a megalomaniacal billionaire hedonist.
Opening September 20, the 145-minute film was stitched together from a two-part, three-plus-hour experience released in 2018. Too often, the theatrical Loro feels rushed or slapdash. Characters, plot points, and motivations are introduced, only to disappear for long stretches before popping up again at their conclusion (if they reappear at all). A blackmail scheme is loaded with portent, then vanishes. Stella (Alice Pagani), a young woman meant to represent a kind of virtue in a depraved world, has a flatness that feels attributable to some key scenes going missing.
What binds it all, though, is Servillo’s Berlusconi. That might seem obvious in a fact-based Fellini-esque fantasy about Berlusconi. But Sorrentino audaciously withholds the introduction of his antagonist for nearly a third of the film.
Set between 2006 and 2010, between Berlusconi’s two stints as Prime Minister, Loro is both a ruthless critique of Italy’s trashy pop culture and trashier culture of political debasement and a surprisingly humane attempt to understand who – and what – Berlusconi is. But for the first 40 minutes, the media-mogul-turned-politician exists more as a myth that could evaporate if you even say his name.
We see his beaming visage tattooed on the small of a working girl’s back (an incredible sight gag). We watch – along with a gasping, starstruck platoon of women in little black dresses hobbling down Rome’s streets in stilettos – as his motorcade zips by. But “Silvio” or “Berlusconi” is rarely, if ever, uttered. Instead, it’s always lui (him). More precisely, lui lui. It’s said with such awe that the word might as well be a proper noun, like God.
When Lui finally appears, it’s as a small, veiled figure in a lawn chair watching the smoldering embers of a raging, MDMA-fueled orgy of sex and debauchery happening at the villa next door to his Sardinian estate. Even then, we only assume it’s him: this rotund figure is in full Indian concubine costume. There’s a menacing quality as this person walks purposefully into the house, looks around deliberately, then makes their way to the sleeping Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci), the current Mrs. Berlusconi. When the veil is removed, and we’re greeted with Silvio’s deep-creased rubbery face, makeup caked on makeup caked on a too-bronze tan, wearing a wide-grinned expression of childlike elation, the carnival lights turn on and – and Silvio, that master barker, has us.
Despite what we know about the real-life Berlusconi — his degenerate sex parties, his venal politics, his iron-fisted control of Italian media — it’s impossible to hate Servillo’s interpretation. This Silvio is charismatic and charming and kind of fun, like a big kid with sociopathic tendencies. Or a Venus fly trap.
In a moment both troubling and bizarre near the end of the film, a young woman wakes up in a bed to find a shoeless Berlusconi watching her, that rubber grin plastered on his face as he holds a pencil in one hand and a crude joke sharpener in the other. Despite all the setup implies, a laugh is inevitable. Then, in perhaps Loro’s best scene, he essentially prank calls a woman selected randomly from a phone book to sell her a nonexistent apartment as a means to test his dormant salesmanship skills. When speaking with the woman, he presents the illusions of intimacy and conspiracy to win her trust and make the non-sale. It’s like watching a psychic work a mark; everything he says is so broad but sounds so specific that it takes the woman aback. How does he know so much about her life, she asks. Servillo waits a beat, takes a breath, and with a twinkle in his eye and worldliness in his voice, says, “I know the script of life.” Berlusconi’s abuse of this woman’s time and trust is undeniably cruel. But listening to his pitch and watching his enthusiasm at selling this woman his dream as her own, you’re ready to give him all your money, too.
This Berlusconi – like the real person – is a narcissistic cartoon, but a self-aware one that Sorrentino and Servillo never allow to become a caricature. Rather, and perversely, he’s the only figure that makes any kind of sense in the upside-down world the director drops us into.
When we meet Berlusconi, he’s in exile, ousted from government after a raft of corruption charges and allegations of criminal behavior. He desperately wants back in, and is willing to break the government to make it happen. His machinations oscillate between Machiavelli (luring gullible senators to his cause) and Looney Tunes (offering to fire off the volcano he has on his property), but you get the urge. What’s incomprehensible is the lengths others will go to just to be in Berlusconi’s orbit.
In the first 40 minutes of Loro, which feels like a setup for a different movie entirely, low-class vulgarian Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) dreams of amassing power and influence (and tons of coke), and he cooks up a scheme to get close to Berlusconi by appealing to the leader’s Bunga Bunga, neo-Caligula appetites. With the help of Kira (Kasia Smutniak), a gorgeous statuesque woman of class with a direct line to Lui, Morra assembles a coterie of beautiful women, troops them out to a villa in Sardinia and, to get Silvio’s attention, proceeds to have that drug-fueled pool party Berlusconi watches from his yard.
For Sergio, this gambit is meant to get him close enough to Berlusconi to realize some cockeyed goal of becoming a member of the European Union parliament. For Kira, it’s her way of showing this 70-something-year-old man that she, a 30-something woman, is still useful in a world of lithe 20-year-olds offering themselves to him. (He keeps getting older…) The women see Berlusconi as a ticket to celebrity and fame as TV stars and models.
What they all learn – too late – is that Berlusconi offers no hope or redemption. It’s a point Loro makes explicit by opening with a sheep wandering into Silvio’s home, standing entranced before a TV playing a dumb Berlusconi-produced game show, and then being slowly frozen to death by a malicious wall-mounted air conditioner. (It even has a nefarious red eye, à la HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) The biblical implication returns at the end of the film, when a crew slowly lifts a pietà Jesus statue out of a crumbled church in the ruins of earthquake-ravaged L’aquila. Resurrection is possible, just not for those who make deals with devils.
This is particularly resonant now, in America, as a Berlusconi-like made-for-TV clown wearing too much makeup alters the landscape of democracy for self-serving, self-enriching ends. There are moments where the similarity between Silvio and Donald is undeniable, like when Berlusconi convinces his grandson he didn’t just step in poop even though the boy watched him do it, telling him, “The only thing that matters is you believed me.” But the message is less one of equivalencies than of caution – about the stability or instability of institutions and humans, and the havoc assumptions about both can cause.
We all underestimate a rubber-faced buffoon, who commands money and power and supplicants, at our own peril — and their profit.
One Comment
..I am afraid is rather a “pimp” portrayal of Silvio berlusconi. Sorrentino, oscar winner director, did not need it..
Elena