Guilio Andreotti’s face, rimmed with long acupuncture needles in the opening scene of Il Divo, suggests Hellraiser rather than anyone who could have been Italy’s prime minister not once but seven times. Then again, Andreotti was no ordinary politician but an actor whose aura of gravity was a low key and carefully cultivated presence. He was the temperamental opposite of theatrical Italian leaders such as Mussolini and Berlesconi. In Il Divo’s highly stylized characterization by actor Toni Servillo, Andreotti minces stiffly across the political stage like a perpetually dour Ed Sullivan. Maybe his pinched lips and wary tread resulted from the chronic headaches that caused him to keep an unsafe painkiller in Italy’s pharmacopeia and, failing that, resort to acupuncture.
Although Andreotti’s career will be little known to American audiences, only a cursory understanding of Italian politics is necessary for grasping this story of an enigma at the heart of intrigue. Even less knowledge is needed to realize that Il Divo (out on DVD) is a cinematic masterpiece. Rather than a conventional narrative, director Paolo Sorrentino composed Il Divo from a series of arresting, often unforgettable images that allude to each other like rhymes in a poem or motifs recurring in different keys throughout a symphony.
According to Sorrentino in a documentary accompanying the film on DVD, the real Andreotti was a man who made himself a symbol; Servillo’s performance and the painstaking choreography of his relations with others, the masterful editing that moves the story back and forth in time, is only an artful exaggeration. The Andreotti who emerges from the film is a ruthless if occasionally rueful man in a battle for the soul of Italy. As a leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, he was determined to keep his country from the clutches of Italy’s powerful Communist Party and from slipping into the chaos of revolution advocated by the Red Brigades. In his crusade against the far left, he was willing to embrace the devil. Andreotti was accused of masterminding or countenancing a long chain of assassinations and even allowing his rival for leadership of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, to be murdered by Red Brigade terrorists.
The Andreotti of Il Divo is an urbane, drolly humorous figure as inscrutable as he must have appeared to the Italian public. More than any “realistic” or documentary style portrayal, Il Divo paints a vivid and imaginative picture of a public man who conducted the real business of governing in private.
