LA GRAZIA**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 12

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (IL DIVO) and actor Toni Servillo reunite for the seventh time for LA GRAZIA - a patient, melancholy drama about love and grief. Servillo plays an Italian President called Mariano.  His character is grappling with whether to sign a Bill legalising euthanasia. He must also sign whether to give a presidential pardon to a woman and a man serving sentences for murdering their respective spouses.  The first was escaping from a violent marriage, the second claims he was committing an act of mercy as his wife was suffering from Alzheimers.   It feels as though the President, a Catholic and a Jurist, is playing for time and running down the clock as he is in the final months of his term, much to the chagrin of his devoted daughter and fellow Jurist Dorotea. Meanwhile in his personal life, Mariano is grieving his wife Aurora, but gripped with suspicions that she had an affair forty years prior with his fellow cabinet minister.

The film takes a leisurely pace as Mariano derps around the Quirinale, pondering what to do, or distracting himself by listening to rap music. This creates a patient meditative feel that I enjoyed but I still feel that it was around 20-30 minutes too long. But to compensate, the film contains flashes of profound hilarity, such as the awards ceremony roughly half way through the film, and builds to a deeply moving and profound conclusion. Much is made of the fact that the Italian phrase La Grazia can mean religious grace, but also a pardon, and also compassion.  

The true joy of the film is just watching Toni Servillo give a masterclass performance full of warmth, compassion and occasionally mischief.  He won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the performance, and rightly so. He can convey more with a single eyebrow raise than most actors with a full fireworks show of histrionics.  Servillo is well matched in the first half of the film by Anna Ferzetti who plays his daughter, and also by Milvia Marigliano as the art critic and lifelong friend Coco Valori.  Coco is a fascinating character. Comic relief in the first half of the film but building toward something more profound and deeply moving. 

LA GRAZIA has a running time of 131 minutes. It played Venice, where Toni Servillo won the Volpi Cup, Telluride and London.  It opens in the US on December 5th.

A HAUNTING IN VENICE**

We are trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns when it comes to Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot films.  ORIENT EXPRESS was a beautifully done, subtly updated, but largely respectful adaptation of the Agatha Christie source material. NILE was also lavish and earnest in its attempts to update the material, but by changing an intricate plot, Branagh utterly ruined the story.  And now we have A HAUNTING IN VENICE, incredibly losely adapted from A Halloween Story. It works neither as detective fiction nor as a ghost story.

Branagh stars as Poirot, now retired and reclusive, in post World War Two Venice.  He is tempted out of his mansion by his old friend, detective author Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey as if she's in a Screwball Comedy.  It's a great performance but one wonders which film it actually belongs to.  They are not trying to investigate a murder but to debunk a medium called Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), who Oliver and Poirot feel is exploiting the grief of opera singer Rowena Drake (Yellowstone's Kelly Reilly). Rowena recently lost her daughter and gathers a motley crew in her spooky Venetian house to make contact with her. There's the daughter's fiancé Maxime, the family doctor and his precocious son, her housekeeper, and Joyce's assistant.  When a storm sets in, we find ourselves in a locked-house mystery.

Writer Michael Green does not have form in creating his own murder-mystery plot and this one barely hangs together. Worse still, he lazily uses the Holocaust as character short-hand device.  This seems crude, especially in a film where Tina Fey is then trying to be a wise-cracking broad.  Pick a lane! I also didn't find the jump scares and obscure angles particularly frightening or effective. What a waste of a great cast and location!

A HAUNTING IN VENICE was released in cinemas in September and is now available on Hulu or other PVOD streaming services. It is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 103 minutes.

THE EQUALISER 3****

Something interesting is happening with THE EQUALISER 3.  I was expecting another "does what it says on the tin" vigilante film, along the lines of 1 and 2.  But 3 has a confidence and a vibe that altogether surpasses its predecessors.  It is so patient in doing the work to create its emotional climax that I wonder if it's even commercial.

The plot is simple enough and sounds like a standard Equaliser film.  In the course of equalising a wrong in a Sicilian mafia cell, our protagonist Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) stumbles upon an operation to import ISIS-manufactured hard drugs, the sale of which is funding terrorist attacks in Europe. He calls the scheme in to CIA operative Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) who brings in the Americans to investigate. Meanwhile, McCall recuperates in a beautiful small town terrorised by organised crime, and decides to equalise their wrongs.

What makes this film fascinating is the way in which the franchise's director, Antoine Fuqua, chooses to go about his business in this final instalment.  

First of all, the style of violence is brutal but credible, and acknowledges McCall/Washington's age. The action sequences are skilful and suspenseful but does not require the superhuman anti-ageing of Tom Cruise in a MI film, or the CGI de-ageing of Harrison Ford in an Indiana Jones film.  McCall's equalising is brutal and effective but always feels perfectly plausible for an older man.

Second, the pace is deliberately slow and the language probably over half in Italian, in a way that truly pays off in the final act.  Fuqua really takes his time establishing McCall's rejuvenation in Altamonte's small town.  The friendship with Dr Enzo, and the slow growth of trust between Robert and the townsfolk, are lightly essayed but deeply moving. The language never switches entirely to English.  I would estimate that over half of the dialogue is in Italian, and I wonder if that choice will impact the film's commercial success. But I loved that choice, as it once again roots McCall in the life of Altamonte and roots us in the stakes of wresting it free of the Camorra. 

The result is a film that has - as strange as it might sound - an elegance, a lightness of touch, but a real impact.  This is enhanced by some truly beautiful cinematography and framing from Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson, as well as the sparing inclusion of only two powerfully choreographed and compelling action sequences. 

It's kind of strange that people don't seem to really talk about Fuqua or this franchise much.  And yet with this instalment - that is so superior to its predecessors - I feel we need to reassess both. Why have they slipped under the radar? Is it because, like the film's protagonist, they are so quiet, unassuming and efficient that they don't call attention to itself? Let me know if you know.

THE EQUALISER 3 is rated R, has a running time of 109 minutes, and is on global release.

L'IMMENSITA*****

1970s suburban Rome.  Clara (Penelope Cruz) is stuck in a luxurious flat with three kids and a husband (Vincenzo Amato) who cheats and humiliates them all.  Rather than confront the issue - or maybe because she feels she has to somehow compensate for her husband's heavy dictatorial presence - Clara becomes almost infantile in her manic desire for childish fun.  

This desire for escapist fantasy is shared by Clara's elder daughter Adri (Luana Giuliani) who wants to be a boy but spends most of the film in sullen silence, only expressing herself by lip-synching to cheesy ballads in her dreams or in a fleeting summer romance with a young girl. Meanwhile, Adri's younger brother Gino is staging a rather more practical real-world protest. And poor little Diana's attempts to make family meals playful feel like a radically whimsical act. That said, the children express sooner than the mother their fundamental knowledge that the parent-child relationship has gone astray.  The question for the audience is how the tension will be resolved. Will Clara be broken on the wheel of stultifying bourgeois misogyny? 

The film is beautifully acted, naturally. There's an aching beauty in Cruz' face, captured in amber in the scenes where her husband imposes an oppressive stillness, or manic in its search for fun. Kudos to costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini and hair stylist Ivan Sprignese who express so much through the state and style of Clara's hair and clothes. I also really loved Dimitri Capuani's production design with its focus on the slow strangulation of seventies shag carpet. 

But really this is Emanuele Crialese's film - deeply personal, both delicate and angry, with a terrible slow-building tension. It shares in common with his stunning 2006 film Nuovomondo/Golden Door a profound interest in women trapped in social convention. It is quietly powerful, and while I merely liked it a lot when I left the screening on Monday, in the days since then I feel that I have been drawn back to it again and again, so that my reaction to it (much as the drama of the film) has also been a slowly increasing intensity of admiration. 

L'IMMENSITA has a running time of 99 minutes. It played Venice 2022 and Sundance 2023. It was released earlier this year in the USA and opens in the UK on Friday 11th August. 

THE HAND OF GOD**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

 

Paolo Sorrentino’s THE HAND OF GOD begins as a kind of group portrait of working class Neapolitans in the 1980s.  It has the feel of a menagerie of grotesques, and Sorrentino feels no politically correct restriction on mocking the fat, the disabled, the absurdly made-up or the mentally ill. This might sound distasteful and yet, and yet, over that hour we come to feel a kind of familial familiarity with these everyday oddballs, delighting in their joy when Maradona signs for Napoli and enjoying their practical jokes. We even come to admire and love the genuinely loving mother and father of the family, delighting in the depiction of an ordinary happy marriage. 

Observing all of this loveable craziness is the younger son of the family, Fabie, whose quiet gaze is pre-directorial. For this is the third film in two days that I've watched where a director tells a fictionalised version of their childhood.  And to be sure, Sorrentino is not going to spend the second hour of this film in rather trivial but engrossing depictions of life in 1980s Napoli. Instead, major life events occur that force Fabie into being the protagonist rather than voyeur of his own life, and of this film.

I absolutely adored this movie. It is by turns hilarious and tragic and strange and whimsical. I merely dock it a star for having had an obvious ending point (for me) in a cathartic playground scene, but lingers for thirty minutes longer. 

THE HAND OF GOD has a running time of 130 minutes and played Venice 2021. It wil be released on Netflix on December 15th.

DIEGO MARADONA

DIEGO MARADONA is the latest doc from Asif Kapadia - the film-maker behind the superb SENNA and AMY.  Once again he uses the same technique - curating a collage of previously unseen video and audio to give an overarching narrative about an icon's inner life.  He doesn't insert himself overtly into the doc in the way that Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore do - but his thesis is very present, conveyed through his editing and shaping of the material. In those prior docs, Kapadia created a villain - Alain Prost and Amy Winehouse's dad. In this one, he creates both hero and villain in Diego and Maradona - the charismatic super-talented slum kid who made good - and the cocky, cocaine-fuelled adulterer who imploded.  It's an effective duality but leaves other factors unexplored. Because Maradona's life - unlike Senna or Amy - allows us a window into two particular social issues which are as fascinating as he is. The first is the racism and classism of Italian society that allows northern football fans to call the Napoli fans black cholera-plagued scum. The second is the influence of the mafia on Napolese life.  These intersect in Maradona, because he was bought for a record sum by Napoli - the poorest club in the poorest town in Italy - bankrolled by the mafia who then courted Diego and gave him cocaine and women. They also intersect because Diego sympathised with Napoli and for a time embodied all its best hopes because he too had been called all the names, treated as scum, and could become their avatar.  I wanted to hear more about these issues and felt that Kapadia was either reluctant or unable to explore them further. And I feel that this is because he was over-concerned with using his treasure trove of unseen Napoli football footage, and remains resistant to using talking heads to provide social context.  The problem with this approach is that for all but the most ardent soccer fan, watching footage of 1980s seria A football isn't that interesting.  And second, that I left the doc wanting more - unsatisfied despite sitting through a 2 hour doc.  That said, it's still a film worth watching for the occasional flashes of Diego's charisma, and the joy of seeing him teach his daughter how to swear at the Juve fans. 

DIEGO MARADONA has a running time of 130 minutes. It played Cannes and Sheffield 2019. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in the USA on September 20th.

LORO

Paolo Sorrentino's latest film LORO (THEM) is a film about the obsequious corrupt parasites that tried to make money during the reign of the abominable Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.  Infamous for amassing a media empire, then using the presidency to protect himself from prosecution and taxes, Berlusconi was a glutton for money and sex.  Moreover, in many senses he was the precursor and pioneer for a new breed of businessman turned populist demagogue - with a line leading from him via Orban to Trump.  Accordingly, one might have expected an urgent and excoriating film treatment from Italy's premier arthouse film-maker, Paolo Sorrentino.  After all, Sorrentino has form!  His nonpareil take-down of Italian Prime Minister Andreotti, IL DIVO, is one of my all-time favourite films.  And his bizarre surreal TV series THE YOUNG POPE is a similar, if fantastical, take-down of the corruption in the Vatican and its links to contemporary Italian politics. 

Imagine, then, my disappointment in finding LORO to be a rather toothless affair. Worse still, baggy, directionless, dare I say it? Dull!  Maybe this is a result of the format that I watched - a still over-long 150 minute compression of what were originally two separate feature films released in Italy last year.  But that still doesn't excuse this highly disjointed, weird final product.

The film opens with its focus on a sleazy low-level businessman who wants to move into the orbit of "him".  He pimps out pretty much every woman he knows, including his partner, for advancement.  He courts one of Berlusconi's mistresses. And makes a final expensive gamble - filling a villa with prostitutes and drugs and dance music - hoping to tempt Berlusconi to this apparently all-summer long bunga bunga party.  This section is really dull. It feels like a succession of beautifully shot living tableaux, set to moronic dance music. Endless shots of scantily clad women.  At some point you ask yourself when the depiction of sexual exploitation is itself exploitative - when the depiction of vacuous people is itself vacuous. 

It's only about an hour into the film that we meet Silvo, as played by the always charismatic Toni Servillo. The disappointment is that Silvio is shown in an almost sympathetic light. He's out of office and out of the good graces of his wife - showing a vulnerability that's disarming.  As the audience, we delight in him flexing his con artist muscles, persuading a random Italian housewife to buy a non-existent flat that she can't afford. THIS is the movie I wanted. A movie that explained Berlusconi's brilliance and charm and ruthlessness. But it's just that one scene.  Finally his wife breaks away and in this desperation he finally falls for the bait in the villa next door. But after so much moral corruption on show, he hardly seems worse than the rest of them. And maybe that's Sorrentino's point?  We get the President we deserve, resemble, need to enable us?

LORO has a running time of 150 minutes. It is currently available to watch in cinemas and on streaming services in the UK and Ireland.

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD

Ridley Scott's new movie is a true life thriller about the kidnapping of the 16 year old oil heir John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer) and his billionaire grandfather's refusal to pay the ransom.  There were many sensible reasons not to do this - such as not encouraging or indeed financing further terrorist acts, but as played by Christopher Plummer, Getty I's primary motive seems to be miserliness. There's no shade, no colour. He claims to love his grandchild but we see no evidence of it. Indeed, in Plummer's hands this becomes one of the most convincing and frightening depictions of greed on screen - when Mark Wahlberg's ex CIA fixer asks Getty how much money he would need to feel secure, he roars "more", and we believe him.  I won't spoil the consequences of this miserly response, but suffice to say that it pits Getty against his ex daughter-in-law Gail (Michelle Williams). She is seen as the voice of reason, familial love, and frustration. She's also, thankfully, not without her own smarts in going up against the oil tycoon.

There's lots to like in this thriller - and I genuinely didn't know how it would turn out for poor JPGIII.   Ridley Scott avails himself of some superb location photography, from LA DOLCE VITA recreated Rome, to sunrise in Marrakesh, to the menacing, claustrophobic, winding streets of a Calabrian hilltop town.  Williams and Christopher Plummer give excellent performances, Romain Duris is also superb in a supporting role in the kidnapper with a heart, and this offsets the somewhat banal presence of both Wahlberg and Charlie Plummer.  I also liked the screenwriter's willingness to mix up the linear timeline early on, and show us a younger version of Grandpa Getty and how ruthless he was.   That said, this movie is not without its flaws. It suffers from a lack of pace in its middle section, Scott is clearly not interested in the victim's experience, Wahlberg is just miscast, and Williams, whose performance is good, chooses to adopt a Katherine Hepburn style mid-atlantic accent that kept on pulling me out of the film.  

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. In the UK it is rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail, threat and language.

The film was released in 2017 in the USA, Greece, Israel, Canada, Belgium. France, Malaysia and Estonia. It opened earlier this year in Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, the UK, Ireland, Lithuania and Romania.  It opens on Jan 11th in the Netherlands, on Jan 12th in Finland, Jan 18th in Hong Kong, Jan 25th in Brazil, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Singapore, Norway, Poland and Sweden, on Feb 1st in South Korea, on Feb 15th in Germany, on Feb 22nd in Russia, and on Feb 23rd in Spain and Turkey. 

SICILIAN GHOST STORY - BFI LFF 2017 Preview

SICILIAN GHOST STORY is a slow-burn drama that tells the tale of a mafia abduction in Sicily from the perspective of the teenage girl who had a crush on its victim. Descriptions of the film often play up the movie's fantasy elements but I found this to be a canard.  This is fundamentally a beautifully observed and melancholy tale of thwarted love and societal injustice. The fantasy elements, such as they are, are lightly handled and can be read as mere imagination and intuition.

The story takes place in a Sicilian hilltown amid verdant fairytale woods rather than in the dusty, oppressive Sicily of the Godfather films.  In a sunlit, giddy opening, our heroine Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) follows the kind, beautiful Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez) into the woods, and like any knight in shining armour, he saves her from a rabid dog. She then plucks up the courage to give him her love letter, and revels in this success that night by sending signals by torchlight to her best friend Loredana (Corinne Musallari).  But the next day at school, Giuseppe is nowhere to be seen, and Luna simply can't accept her parents and teachers explanations that he's sick or gone away.  The societal silence around his kidnapping, punishing his father for becoming an informant, is claustrophobic and brings Luna to the edge of madness. She cannot fathom why no-one will help her find her beloved when he can only be being held in the surrounding villages. Memories of their brief time together draw her back to the woods, and to the makeshift house where he is being held.  Her mother approximates a kind of buttoned up Mrs Danvers with her cool hardness and the owls are not what they seem. And all the time, poor Giuseppe is still imprisoned, clinging onto Luna's love letter but ever weaker and more apathetic.

The film works beautifully as an allegory of the impossibility of innocence in a corrupt world. Even outside of the main story, we see Loredana beaten by her father so much that she doesn't even seem to be bothered by it any more. At any rate, it gives her a magnificent toughness that puts her in a class of Badass Movie Best Friends all of her own.  But the real victory of the film is to be unflinching in its depiction of violence but also to give us some room for hope without seeming forced or simplistic.  After 90 minutes of very slow action, and an ending that I thought was all its own, the  movie continued and I was rather glad it did. It's also beautifully shot by Luca Bigazzi (YOUTH) and depicts a Sicily quite unlike that we have on screen before.

SICILIAN GHOST STORY played Cannes 2017. It was released in Italy earlier this year. It goes on release in France on November 15th and in Argentina on December 7th. Tickets are still available to see it at the BFI London Film Festival 2017.

TALE OF TALES

Matteo Garrone hangs a sharp right from quasi-docu-realist Mafia dramas into seventeenth century Italian fantasy horror with his new portmanteau film TALE OF TALES.  The movie is based on three tales collected by Giambattista Basile - tales that went on to inspire the Grimms and Hans Christian Anderson two centuries later.  But rather than give us the familiar precursors to Cinderella or Puss In Boots we get three tales of weird unfamiliarity and satisfyingly gruesome meaning.

In the first, Salma Hayek plays a queen desperate to bear a child no matter what the cost of trusting a malevolent wizard.  The poster art of this film shows one of its most memorable visuals - Hayek eating a giant bloody sea-monster's heart in a stunningly ornate white room.  But this story is full of arresting visuals - from John C Reilly's king in a diving suit battling the monster, to two albino twins escaping under that same sea.  For the Queen never truly realises what the wizard tells her - that every life and every action is bought at a price, and that the closer one tries to force love, the further it slips away.

HUNGRY HEARTS - LFF14 - Day Seven

HUNGRY HEARTS makes a superb companion piece to Susanne Bier’s A SECOND CHANCE. Both films are concerned with presenting mothers that challenge our prejudices of good parenting and both contain a slow build of frustration and pent up emotion that prompt ordinary people to take extreme steps. Moreover, both films are exceptionally well made and acted - provocative and insightful.

In HUNGRY HEARTS the focus is on a young couple played by Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver (GIRLS). They meet cute - I mean - it’s the ultimately nauseating cute way to meet - and proceed quickly through a picture-perfect marriage to pregnancy. And here the cracks appear. The wife becomes intensely phobic of doctors, refuses to eat enough to nourish the baby, and almost sabotages the birth. And then, once the baby is born, she becomes so overprotective against the apparent menaces of processed food and germs that the baby barely gains weight. An increasingly frustrated husband is caught between concern for his son and his enduring love for his wife, and ultimately the film resolves itself in how which way he eventually jumps on that question and the social context of judgment around both sides.

What is impressive about this film is just how sinister the apparently waif-like wife becomes and how claustrophobic the apartment is - aided by sparing but powerful use of a fish-eye lens. Both actors do a great job but I have particular respect for Adam Driver who manages to credibly appear concerned for both parties when many people in the audience, myself included, would have gladly slapped the mother, stolen the child and headed for the hills. Of course, as the movie goes on we realise that she is genuinely mentally ill and so some sympathy returns. But it’s fascinating how an arthourse audience - usually very willing to say the grey shades of morality - found it hard to sympathise with her even at the end. Mistreating a baby is apparently the moral top trumps.

This may or may not be a problem for the film. Is it possible to enjoy a film when you spend most of its runtime wanting to commit a violent act against its central character and increasingly disliking its other lead character for enabling her? I noticed a handful of people walk out and I suspect that may have been the problem. In a sense, the director Saverio Constanzo (IN MEMORY OF ME) is a victim of his own success - creating an atmosphere so toxic it’s almost unbearable. For those reasons I suspect this film will be a tough sell, which is a shame. Moreover, it’s fantastic to see Adam Driver given the range to be very impressive indeed.

HUNGRY HEARTS has a running time of 109 minutes.  The movie played Venice, where the lead actors well-deservedly won the Volpi Cup for Best Acting, London and Toronto 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

The Best of 2012 - ARTHOUSE MOVIES

So here's to the wilfully obscure, fragile, indulgent movies that fought the accountants and got made in the teeth of every sound investment principle. Away from the mainstream formulaic releases, the reason we watch hundreds of films a year is to uncover gems such as these.  In retrospect, I can discern a theme, which is of young naive girls left to fend for themselves when their parents abuse their responsibility toward them.

Matteo Garrone's audacious REALITY

First up, Matteo Garrone astonished me with his visual audacity and provocative take on reality TV. His REALITY was one of those films that leaves you reeling - at once surreal and profoundly familiar. He focuses on a small-town guy desperate to appear on the Italian version to the point where he becomes delusional.  There's a rich seam of black humour, a joy in the grotesque, and a deep truth about how in the world of Facebook and Youtube our lives only have meaning if documented. 

Another Italian director, Daniele Cipri, elaborated on the themes of moral corruption and easy winnings with his similarly ambitious, audacious, darkly comic but ultimately terrifying film, IT WAS THE SON.  The movie stars Toni Servilio as the father of a family in a decrepit mafia-riddled town, squabbling over a windfall to the point of insanity. It shows humanity as grotesque and greedy but never with scorn. 

From Italy to Denmark for Thomas Vinterberg's fictionalised account of an innocent schoolteacher accused of paedophilia, THE HUNT. Mads Mikkelsen visibly shrinks into his role as the quiet, downtrodden teacher, and the movie is all too believable.  It serves as a modern fable about the danger of quick judgements and mob hysteria. 

Mexican director Michel Franco's brutal film about schoolyard bullying, AFTER LUCIA, was perhaps the most brutal watch of the year.  It meticulously shows how an escalation of bullying can lead to devastating result, and hinges on a superb performance from teenager Tessa Ia. Every parent of a teenage daughter needs to watch this flick with their kid.

From Mexico to Chile, where Pablo Larrain's superbly researched NO! tells the story of Chile's referendum to end dictatorship from the point of view of the ad exec hired by the pro-democracy campaign.  Gael Garcia Bernal is compelling as the cynical exec crafting Coke-like ads to woo the youth slowly discovering his political conscience.  I had no clue about this episode before the film, but was utterly riveted and can still remember the ad jingles. 

Next up, two films about teenage girls of no mean courage forced to fend for themselves in extraordinary circumstances, symbolic of their times. Aussie director Cate Shortland recreates Germany at the end of World War Two in this German-language drama about a young girl, LORE, whose Nazi parents are apprehended.  She must take her small siblings across the war-torn, lawless countries, as well as grappling with the enormity of the fact that her parents were on the losing side, and all that they told her may not have been true.  It's a deeply affecting, beautifully made picture. 

The second film is Sally Potter's loosely autobiographical GINGER & ROSA, set in highly politicised 1960s London. Elle Fanning has a perfect British accent as sensitive, intelligent, naive young Ginger whose best friend Rosa sleeps with her father causing an emotional crisis. It's a delicate, fragile movie that drips with authenticity and melancholy. 

As brutal as AFTER LUCIA, Scott Graham's tense, austere drama SHELL was astounding. The British drama featured Chloe Pirrie as a teenager in remote rural Scotland living with her widower father: a relationship in such isolation that it become necessarily unhealthy. 

From Europe to the Middle East for Israeli dirctor Rama Burshtein's visually ravishing, intense, claustrophobic emotional drama, FILL THE VOID. The movie stars Hadas Yaron as Shira, a naive young girl in the Orthodox Israeli community.  She is pressured by her family into marrying her deceased sister's widower, and is repulsed, shocked and entranced by the emotions she feels for him and the impact she has on him.  This was perhaps the movie that prompted the most visceral reaction in me all year.  

Back to the USA, and perhaps my favourite film of the year: the poignant, melancholy, deeply affecting buddy movie, ROBOT & FRANK.  Jake Schreier's drama is set in the near future, and stars Frank Langella as a retired burgler suffering from Alzheimer's, called, Frank, who forms an unlikely attachment to his medical carer robot. This movie poses so many profound questions about the nature of memory, and the duties of family, and what constitutes a "real" relationship, but does so with an admirably light touch.  I'm not ashamed to say it got a little dusty in the theatre. 

Finally, two honourable mentions: movies with art-house sensibilities but mainstream releases: Ang Lee's LIFE OF PI and Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM.  Both movies with particular and beautiful visual palettes that tell seemingly fairytale stories of deep import.  Both among the best films of the year. 

THE HUNT was released in the UK in November 2012 but does not have a US release date yet. REALITY will be released in the UK on March 22nd 2013 but has no US release date.  LORE will be released in the UK on February 22nd but does not yet have a US release date. SHELL will be released in the UK on March 15th but does not yet have a US release date. NO! will be released in the UK on February 8th and in the USA on February 15th. ROBOT & FRANK was released in the USA last year and will be released in the UK on March 8th. IT WAS THE SON, FILL THE VOID and AFTER LUCIA do not yet have a US or UK release date. 

London Film Fest 2012 Day 10 - IT WAS THE SON

Is this a trend or just two Italian movies that just happen to have the same absurdist - sinister- tragic reaction to the corrupting effect of consumer credit culture on Italian family life? I ask this because two of the most thematically rich movies of this year's London Film Festival have been Italian, and not just Italian, but focussing on working class families in mafia strongholds, who have a sudden chance at easy money and have their heads turned by it, with tragic consequences.  Moreover, in each film, the film grammar that the director uses to depict these events is one of absurdity that treads a fine line between hilarity and tragedy.  Each film features a directorial style that is formally controlled, deliberately stylised, and heightened.  We are in the world of a modern day fairy tale, combining both the fantastical and sinister elements that that genre encompasses.

The first film in this vein was Matteo Garrone's supremely beautiful and disturbing REALITY.  The second is the debut feature of director Daniele Cipri, IT WAS THE SON.  Toni Servillo (IL DIVO) stars as the paterfamilias of a working class Sicilian family, making a meagre living from scavenging scrap metal  from the docks, supporting his wife, parents, beloved daughter Serenella and feckless son Tancredi (a wry reminder of faded Sicilian grandeur from Il Gattopardi?)  In the first act of this drama, Cipri depicts the family in all its comic absurdity, but with a loving, gentle tone.  Toni Servillo is, of course, the master of this kind of role - giving an astounding physical performance that transforms the quietly conniving Andreotti of IL DIVO into a raucous, rude, domineering, but wickedly funny father.  In particular, we fall in love with the relationship between father and equally obstinate young daughter.

Accordingly, it's a wrench when Serenella is shot by a stray mafia bullet, and when almost immediately the movie switches in tone from tragedy back to the broad humour of its first act.  For the family is now entitled to compensation, and their high spending in advance of its receipt and the father's obsession with his brand new Mercedes drives the action in the second and third act respectively.  

The movie has a visual style and imagination which is right up there with Garrone and Sorrentino, and I was not at all surprised to see that the cinematographer was lauded at Venice. It also has, similar to Garrone, a willingness to look the poverty and corruption of the South right in the face, but without being patronising.  The only problem I had with the film was that I felt quite uneasy about the tonal shift between the death of the daughter and the resumption of the extreme black humour. But as the movie progressed to its shocking denouement (and a genuinely unexpected twist) I began to realise that this was indeed Cipri's point. Rather than seeing the uneasy tonal shifts as a failure of direction, one has to see them as a deliberate provocation pointing us toward the surreality and ultimate injustice of life in the Mezzogiorno.

IT WAS THE SON played Venice and London 2012 and was released in Italy in September.

London Film Fest 2012 - Top Picks - REALITY

Our latest top pick for this year's London Film Festival also makes it onto our Best of 2012 list - an hilarious, absurd and yet haunting comedy about our obsession with reality TV from the director behind the mafia documentary GOMORRAH, Matteo Garrone.  REALITY has three showings at the London Film Fest, and tickets are still available for two.  Check out the BFI website for more information.

REALITY is an astounding and disturbing film - equally funny and provocative - finding a delicate balance between the absurd and the tragic. Set in contemporary Naples, the movie opens with a bravura  aerial/tracking shot that sees a gaudy, glitzy golden carriage carry a bride and groom into a wedding ceremony of lurid grandeur.  Alexandre Desplat's score has some of the mischief and fairytale madness of Danny Elfman's Tim Burton soundtracks, and the deliberate framing and wonderfully mobile cinematography lend the scene an energy and vivacity. The director is evidently captivated by his grotesques, eschewing any kind of patronising sneering at these Italian chavs.  The whole thing is crazy, faintly disturbing, but somehow alluring.

The wedding guests go wild for the star attraction - a recent winner of Big Brother - and this adulation sparks the envy, admiration and almost childlike awe of local fishmonger and small-time scam-artist, Luciano.  He is a simple, warm-hearted man whose love for his children allows us to forgive him the comedic absurdity of dragging an old woman from Mass.  After all, in working class Naples, everyone's running a scam, and this movie is at its best when it captures the everyday corruption, the warmth of families living in cramped, cruddy conditions - a city so rotten that its masonry is crumbling - a city that's so much fun we luxuriate in its larger-than-life characters and long-standing friendships.  The first hour of REALITY is filled with these beautifully choreographed, effervescent family tableaux.

As we move into the second hour of the film, the film becomes tragicomic as Luciano's dream of becoming a contestant on Big Brother comes rather close to reality - he even gets to go to Cinecitta in Rome for an audition.  But this glimmer of hope is fanned into a kind of madness as he starts to believe that casual passers-by are vetting him as a potential contestant. The movie subtly raises interesting parallels between traditional and contemporary Italian, if not western, society.  In generations past, our moral codes had a religious imperative - we did good, if we did at all, partly because we feared an omniscient and omnipresent god was policing us.  By contrast, Luciano does good because he thinks he is being vetted. Big Brother is always watching, and is the beatific calm that Luciano experiences in his good works any less valid?  The movie gives a clear answer.  The disturbing near maniacal laughing and insane isolation at the end of the film - the fact that we are not prosecuted by, but desirous of Big Brother's ever-open eye - the subtle contrast of a Cinecitta used to film shoddy reality shows with the august history we cinephiles know it has....This is a movie about decadence - moral, material, and finally mental.

It made me laugh. And then it didn't.

REALITY played Cannes, where it won the Grand Prize of the Jury, and London 2012.  It is currently on release in Italy and France and opens on October 11th in Russia; on October 25th in Portugal; and on November 7th in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

Running time: 115 minutes. Language: Italian.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

TO ROME WITH LOVE is a rather mediocre, derivative, Woody Allen movie - a portmanteau of four stories, neither of which is especially interesting, well-acted or well-developed.  The only real link is that they all take place in Rome - there isn't a link between them - either through the characters or thematically, as far as I can tell. 

The most ill-fitting of the four stories, by virtue of the fact that it's in Italian and also because it isn't romantic but whimsical-philosophical, centres on an ordinary Joe (Roberto Benigni) who suddenly becomes famous for no reason he can see. It's kind of an inverse Josef K situation - and a wry comment on the fatuousness of modern celebrity culture - and reminded  me of early Woody Allen movies where a fantastical idea was worked out to it's ludicrous extreme. The problem is that the story makes a rather simplistic point, and doesn't really take it anywhere.

The story I found simultaneously the best and worst features Woody Allen himself back in an acting role, as a cynical retired impresario who puts his daughter's Italian father-in-law on the stage. Problem is, this simple mortician can only sing when he's in the shower. It's meant to be fantastic and funny but fell rather flat for me. The only redeeming feature was Judy Davis, cast once again as Woody Allen's wife.  She gets the only really funny one-liners of the whole film.

Next up, we have Jesse Eisenberg playing a young Woody Allen character - an unsatisfied cynic who cheats on his earnest girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) with her flighty, flirty best friend (Ellen Page). I really hated this segment, mainly because the romantic triangle is well-worn in Woody Allen; second, because I thought Ellen Page was woefully miscast as the femme fatale; and third, the conceit of having Alec Baldwin play a devil on the shoulder of Jesse Eisenberg's character also just fell flat.

Finally, we have the weakest story of the bunch.  A young Italian couple lose each other - she flirts with an elderly actor and he gets entangled with the cliché Woody Allen brassy whore (Penelope Cruz.) No laughs, no insights, no point.

All in all, after his recent good run, this is an utterly worthless and mirthless movie.  We've seen all this done before - and better. Most of all, it's disappointing to see Jesse Eisenberg wasted on such poor material.  He's an actor who seems to have been playing Woody Allen all his life.

TO ROME WITH LOVE opened earlier this year in Italy, the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, Uruguay, Belgium, France, Israel, Russia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Iceland, Mexico, Denmark, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Greece and India. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Portugal, Singapore, Estonia and Spain. It opens on September 28th in Taiwan and Turkey; on November 9th in Bulgaria; and on December 20th in New Zealand.

CERTIFIED COPY - A noble failure

Reknowned Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, has made his first non-Farsi feature, CERTIFIED COPY. The movie plays as a two-hander between Juliette Binoche, who won an award at Cannes for her performance in the film, and opera-singer William Shimmel, who makes his feature debut. He plays an English author called James Miller, in Italy to promote his book. Its central idea is that copies are as valuable as originals - and indeed, that all originals, in art, are essentially copies of the real-life model anyway. Pulled away from his lecture, Binoche's character leaves a note inviting him to meet the next day. She is a fan - he has to sign many copies of his book for her - but then again, she doesn't seem to agree with his central thesis. The opening half hour sees them argue of the nature of worth and beauty. She is fan - nervous, following his direction - and he seems irritated, spending time with her merely to pass time. The movie is hard to engage with - the conversation is too dry, too stilted - maybe a fault of the translation? The only thing that held my attention was the recognition of familiar Kiarostami tropes - conversations in cars, mobile phones interrupting conversations, the inability to communicate. The movie seems strange, disconcerting, and rather boring - but was this deliberate - the calm before the storm?

Something changes in the movie when the protagonists drive to a Tuscan hill-town and take a coffee. James describes the inspiration for the book - having observed a scene with a mother and son in Florence. He does not finish describing it, but it has a deep emotional impact on Binoche's character. Was she the mother? Why is she crying? Why does he callously get up to take a call regardless of her distress? We will never know - this just isn't that kind of film. The second occurrence in the cafe that shifts the gears of the film is that the proprietress mistakes them to be a married couple. Binoche's character falls in with the mistake, and soon James does too. The tension increases - the disquiet increases. By playing husband and wife without ever discussing why or whether too, they don't just flirt, or have moments of tenderness, but bicker and disagree. Binoche's character resents her husbands long absences and neglect of their teenage son. Using the man in front of her as a proxy - a copy - she vents her frustration and he responds in kind. The intensity of the exchange makes us wonder if they are really acting or if they were acting in the first part of the film - are they really husband and wife?

The film is hard to read - or rather there are many ways in which to read it. But what troubles me is that I can't read its success because even the performances are hard to pin down. Is William Shimmel a wooden actor - outclassed by Binoche? Or is he playing a character that's meant to be wooden, callous, emotionally avoidant? Is Binoche's performance bad because it occasionally veers into hamminess? Or is she playing a woman who is melodramatic, emotionally unstable, needy?

Overall, I found CERTIFIED COPY intellectually interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. I admired it more than enjoying it. It raised interesting questions about proxies and originals, and the difficulty of communication. But it also raised too many questions about the essential quality of the performances - and I suspect the answers would not be forgiving to either actor. So, overall, a noble failure, but far better to fail at something provocative and slipper than mundane.

CERTIFIED COPY played Cannes 2010 and was released in France, Italy and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK.

NINE - a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit

Rob Marshall directed two movies before NINE and I didn't like either of them. His movies are pretty on the surface and are obviously the product of much care and attention to detail. But somehow they miss the essential point of the story, not to mention any subtlety or subversion. And this is a major flaw in movies that deal with the the appearance and reality of sexual domination (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) and sexual and judicial corruption (CHICAGO).

And yet, still flush with the some-time success of CHICAGO, Marshall had the ambition to tackle NINE, a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of Fellini's seminal movie - perhaps one of the greatest movies of all time - 8 1/2. How can I explain to you what a technical, psychological and dramatic achievement Fellini's film was? It was a movie that dared to depict the impossibility and insanity of trying to create art in a commercial, celebrity-obsessed environment. Even more daring, it was a movie that threw its own director's psyche onto the screen - his narcissism, his eroticism, his conflicted relationship with his childhood, his relationship with his mother, his wife, his lovers....8 1/2 was a movie so radical and so brilliant that it redefined cinema. It was a movie so great that other directors tried to compete with it and came up short - Henri Georges Clouzot, with his INFERNO, had a heart attack trying.

If great artists have tried and failed to match Fellini, what can we say about Broadway composer and lyricist, Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston? Sadly not much. Yes, they have gotten the bare bones of the story - the narcissistic movie director battling writer's block and a kind of personal crisis - running between his wife and his lover - but never finding the pure adoration that only an Italian mother can give. But they fail to translate Fellini's daring and subversion to the Broadway stage. Worse still, the songs are rather anonymous. "Be Italian" has a decent melody but the rest are utterly forgettable. Worse still, the lyrics have none of the rapier-like wit of CHICAGO or CABARET. No, this is a poor vehicle indeed on which to hang a Hollywood film.

Rob Marshall takes poor fare and does nothing to improve it. Yes, there are a couple of new songs but none of them have any more punch than the originals. Indeed, the 60s pastiche Cinema Italiano, is truly bad. Worst of all, Marshall didn't have the balls to change the incredibly weak opening number. And, after all, what's a song and dance show without a bravura opening number? Catherine Zeta Jones in CHICAGO gripped the audience.

Okay, so the music is weak - hardly Marshall's fault. What about the purely cinematic choices? The casting is variable in its success. Daniel Day-Lewis is either miscast as the director, Guido Contini, or mis-directed by Marshall. Day-Lewis' attempt at an Italian accent distracts from his perfect physical embodiment of the distracted, harrassed, hunch-shouldered director. Penelope Cruz and Judi Dench have a lot of fun and perform with gusto as Guido's lover and loyal friend. Marion Cotillard is superb as Guido's suffering wife. Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas is the best singer and performer by far in the best song in the piece, despite Marshall saddling her with frightful hair and make-up and entirely missing the eroticism of the encounter with the kid. Less happily, we have Nicole Kidman doing nothing special as the Anita Ekberg inspired movie star Claudia. Sophia Loren survives on her iconic status. Kate Hudson is entirely out of her depth but luckily only has to do a MTV dance routine before she's off stage. Her part is entirely disposable.

Most importantly, Marshall doesn't attempt to translate the complexity at the heart of the piece. And without that, Guido comes across as merely annoying, unsympathetic and whiny - a big kid with a mamma complex and an over-extended libido. The women, with the exception of the wife, are not really developed. As a consequence, when one of them does something dramatic, it seems not so much out of character, as we don't know what her character really is, but out of the blue. It's just hard to care. The movie becomes a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit. And frankly, there's nothing entertaining about that.

NINE is on release in the US, UK and Slovenia. It opens next week in Greece and Canada. It opens in January in Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, Cyprus, Denmark, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Spain, Taiwan and Romania. It opens in February in Argentina, Hungary, Sweden, France, Finland, Belgium, Germany and Singapore. It opens in March in Japan.

Pantheon movie of the month - SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of the most important directors of the twentieth century: he lived, portrayed and died the political crises that plagued Europe and the world.

SALO is the last film that Pasoloni made. It comes after his social realist films where, as a committed Communist, he tried to make honest works about working class life and celebrated honest sexuality. He had become disillusioned with the project, and the non-responsive of the working class audience. SALO is thus a brutal and bleak critique of the political regimes and social changes he had lived through in Italy. First, and most powerfully, it is a criticism of the extreme corruption and degradation of the Fascist regime. Second, it is a criticism of what came after the war, when Italy "caught up" under Marshall Plan economic aid, creating "Il Boom!" - a society of consumers gorging themselves.

The title of SALO also works on two levels: first as an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel and second as a reference to the small town on Lake Garda whence Mussolini ran the final fascist government of Italy, propped up by Hitler. The movie shows four powerful men representing each type of power: feudal, religious, legal and political, enjoying absolute power at the end of a dying regime. Together with their complicit guards and two old prostitutes, they imprison an equal number of young men and women and subject them to horrific sexual torture. Finally, the prisoners are killed.

The point about Salo is that the sexually explicit material is not there to titillate (as in Sade) but to shock and disturb. And it is not there to shock gratuitously or in a sensationalist manner. It is there for a particular and explicit political purpose: to illustrate the absolutely corruption and complete power of the Fascist regime. Further, Pasolini is making the point that, fundamentally, sexual relations are power relations. He is also expressing a Hobbesian world-view: man is corrupt and, if given the opportunity of absolute power, will descend into violence. Sexual violence is an important part of that. Sex in SALO is used to degrade. It is not erotic. And it is this continuing, bludgeoning, extreme degradation that makes SALO such a bleak, punishing film.

Technically, the film achieves brutality without titillation by framing its scenes as stylised, symmetric tableaux that distance the viewer from the action. Sexual acts are shown in cruel light and filmed without the pleasing soft-focus of typical sex scenes in mainstream movies. The audience POV is often the same as that of the guards or the torturers, making us feel even more uneasy about what we are watching. This is especially true of the final scenes of torture, which we see through the binoculars of the torturers. This has the added benefit of showing the final scenes of murder at a distance, so that we imagine more than we are actually shown.

If the material is shocking, Pasolini has achieved his end. Maybe, he is saying, we should have been more shocked by, and more active in resistance to, the political degradation of Fascism. If he has to resort to sexual torture to shock us, isn't that partly our fault?

The Duke: We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we're masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.

SALO opened in 1976 and immediately encountered difficulties with the censors because of its sadistic and sexually explicit material. In 2000 the British Film Institute instigated a screening and debate about the film, resulting in the the release of a BFI DVD. This includes the film, uncut, and a supplemental disk replete with fascinating documentaries about Pasolini, the film, and the censor's response to it.

1900 - NOVOCENTO - a magnificent hymn to class struggle

1900 is the mistranslated title of Italian auteur, Bernardo Bertolucci's political epic, NOVOCENTO - more literally, 20th CENTURY. It's a majestic, sprawling film that was financed lavishly on the back of the success of LAST TANGO IN PARIS, but even then exceeded its budget by millions. A source of controversy and initial disappointment when it played Venice and Cannes, even it's heavily reduced 3 hour cut is a marathon experience. Granted, the movie has moments of seeming self-indulgence. It is blatantly partisan, and is often poorly dubbed. But this is more than compensated for by beautiful visuals from DP Vittorio Storaro, unforgettable dramatic set-pieces, and the honesty and courage with which Bertolucci examines male friendship, moral cowardice and the mob mentality.

Essentially the movie is a story of childhood friendship turned to betrayal and anger. As the movie opens, an icon of unified Italy, Verdi, has died and two boys have been born. They represent the twin political forces that will split the newly unified country in two, and define the politics of twentieth century Western Europe. Alfredo is the rich son of the local landowner, a beneficiary of conservative politic interests; Olmo is the poor son of the local farmers, downtrodden, disenfranchised, but ripe for radical politics. Their child-hood is played out during endless summers: the fields are fecund, the sun always shines, and life is good. The young boys discover their sexuality together and are firm friends. Alfredo's home life is stunted by a cold and exploitative family - best symbolised by his lecherous grandfather (Burt Lancaster) who leers over a buxom milk-maid - exploited sexually and financially. By contrast, Olmo is raised by his community, in one particularly striking scene, standing atop a well-laden table as the village eats supper and the sun shines behind him giving him a halo. He is metaphorically the blessed son of the land.

As teenagers, the two boys are wing-men, visiting whores together, but politics and economics pull them apart in the autumn of their lives. Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) is a Communist and Alfredo (Robert de Niro) is his class enemy. His life is decadent - he marries a beautiful but distant wife - and his character callow. On his wedding day he allows a fascist mob to hound Olmo for apparently murdering a child. And so we are introduced to the most terrifying and memorable character in the movie, Atilla Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland). If Alfredo is upper class and Olmo working class, Atilla represents the middle-class response to class struggle - a radical movement to create a new elite and keep both decadent aristos and the mob oppressed. Nowhere is the brutality and egotism of Fascism better and most horrifyingly depicted on screen than in Sutherland's Oscar-worthy portrait. Winter has truly settled upon Italy.

As the war ends in humiliation, scores must be settled. The mob turns on the Fascists: Bertolucci seems to indicate that a necessary destruction preceeds the Spring of renewal and rebirth for modern Italy. Alfredo and Olmo are reuited as old men, fighting, literally, as the movie ends, transformed into little children again. Bertolucci's class struggle continues - it is historically determined and inevitable.

1900 - NOVOCENTO played Venice 1976 and was released that year. It is available on DVD.

London Film Festival Day catch-up - IL DIVO

The London Film Festival is a marathon event where you try and pack in as many films as you can, pausing only to refuel. But this year, I've done something I've never done before: seen the same film twice. I knew that there was a high probability I was going to love Paolo Sorrentino's IL DIVO before I saw it the first time. His sinister, darkly comic, bizarre film THE FAMILY FRIEND was on my "Best Of" list in 2007, and I am fascinated by the grand macchiavellian figures of modern politics. What better, then, than a Sorrentino treatment of the political career of Giulio Andreotti - seven times prime minister of Italy, famously accused of colluding with the mafia and the masonic P2 lodge? The reviews were wildly enthusiastic, and the movie had already won the Prix du Jury at Cannes.

Still, for all my anticipation, I could not have predicted just how strong my reaction would be. IL DIVO is simply a tremendous film that takes the raw subject matter of political biography and presents it with imagination, wit and a holistic view of Andreotti as a symbol of the endemic corruption of the Italian elite. Take an early scene when Andreotti has become premier once more and is on the verge of attempting to take the Presidency. The Andreotti faction of the Christian Democrats is at the height of its power and flush with success. Inside parliament a massive party is raging, with African music playing and ministers of state dancing manically. It's a wild display of power and ownership. Italy is their plaything. Power is a right. Why trust to luck - to mere democracy, when you can negotiate votes from mafia-controlled regions? "I don't believe in chance, I believe in the will of God." Meanwhile, Andreotti is in a back room, holding court, sipping his ubiquitous alka selzter.

The central performance from Toni Servillo is masterful. He has been physically transformed into the ageing politician with the corners of his ears turned down, the large glasses, the hunched back, the repressed, closed gait and the sly smiles. Even when he falls under accusation of being complicit in the death of Aldo Moro and having symbolically kissed mafia boss of bosses Tony Riina, Andreotti always seems in control and, in a macabre way, amused by the game. More seriously, he uses the same slippery arguments that we hear from hard-line politicians everywhere: it takes a truly good man, truly concerned with the good of his country, to be able to consort with sinners and perpetrate evil acts. The ambiguity and mystery at the centre of this film is whether a man as intelligent and as conscious of irony as Andreotti would really believe such a statement or just like the sound of it. Maybe it doesn't matter. To quote Andreotti, "We learn from the Gospel that when they asked Jesus what truth was, he did not reply."

Even bad films can contain great performances. Frank Langella was superb in FROST/NIXON playing a similarly despised, conflicted, mired politician who thought he was a "good" man. But the surrounding film was clumsy and superficial. Nixon's downfall was shoe-horned into a Hollywood story about a hero fighting evil against all odds, and with everything to lose. By contrast, IL DIVO is a brilliant film because it puts Andreotti in the context of Italian politics - with a cast of oddballs equally as interesting as the protagonist. Moreover, Sorrentino chooses a technique to tell his story that's as ambiguous, complicated and darkly comic as the subject matter. Indeed, in its complicated elliptic structure, its visual stylings and its playful use of sound-track, IL DIVO is one of the most technically audacious movies I have seen in a while. Take for instance a scene where the newly re-elected Andreotti enters parliament, walking through grandiose halls, to an internal sound-track of pompous classical music. A cat meows, the sound-track comes to an abrupt halt, and Andreotti stares down the cat. The cat moves, the sound-track restarts and Andreotti's triumphal march continues. How better could one illustrate the idea that these men were playing out a sort of egomaniacal fantasy of wealth and privilege, despite their often humble upbringing?

IL DIVO repays multiple viewings. I'd go further and say that it actually requires them. If you're not completely familiar with Italian politics, and I'm certainly not, then on the first viewing you're hanging on to your seat trying to keep up with the machinations of the various characters. It takes a second viewing to be able to see through the headlines, into the deep, rich world of Italian politics behind them and to be able to more fully appreciate the directorial choice. Like I said, I've seen this film twice now and I can't wait to see it again.

IL DIVO played Cannes 2008, where it won the Jury Prize, Toronto and London. It opened earluer this year in Italy and opens in France on December 31st. It opens in the UK on January 23rd and in the Netherlands on February 26th.