Old Yorker

  • Loro

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paolo Sorrentino (2018)

    I didn’t much fancy seeing another Paolo Sorrentino film but he’s so admired I felt I ought to and the trailers for this week’s high-profile new releases supplied stronger reasons to avoid them:  Vox Lux features flashing lights as well as Natalie Portman; hard to know where to start with Tolkien.  Besides, although the internationally released version of Loro lasts two-and-a-half hours, that’s much less than Sorrentino served up to his compatriots.  In spring 2018, this portrait of Silvio Berlusconi and his circle – the title translates as ‘Them’, though it could also be a play on l’oro (gold) – arrived in Italian cinemas in two instalments, with an interval of sixteen days between the openings and an aggregate running time of 204 minutes.

    Sorrentino starts with a lengthy disclaimer, described by some reviewers as tongue in cheek and ‘lawyer-baiting’.  Loro, set in the period between 2006 and 2009, ‘stems from its authors’ independent and free imagination’ (the screenplay is by the director and Umberto Contarello).  It draws on news stories but these have been used to create ‘a purely artistic film’ and with no intention ‘to represent an objective truth’.  Sorrentino’s visual imagination and skill turn out to justify the phrase ‘artistic film’; but if his disclaimer is code for ‘I’ve done what I liked’ with real people and events, the result, ironically, is less free than that might suggest.  Silvio Berlusconi is so well known a figure that, if you’re going to present him on screen – rather than use him as the basis for a Berlusconi-type politician and crook – you set up very definite audience expectations.

    These include that Loro will be a hatchet job.  Unlike older Italian film-makers like Marco Bellocchio and Nanno Moretti, Sorrentino isn’t publicly left-wing but no one familiar with Il Divo (2008), his biography of Giulio Andreotti, will have anticipated an admiring treatment of the outrageous political sensation that Berlusconi once was.  The film is, however, easier on its leading man than many would have guessed, at least in showing his septuagenarian vulnerabilities.  It’s less decidedly unsympathetic than, to cite an obvious recent example, Adam McKay’s account of Dick Cheney in Vice.  All this may go some way to explaining Loro’s commercial under-performance.  (According to Wikipedia, it’s taken less than $8m, having cost around $21m to make.)  Berlusconi supporters will have stayed away on principle.  Press reaction and word of mouth have probably combined to disappoint and deter Berlusconi haters.

    Whatever the reasons for Loro‘s poor box office, people who’ve not seen it haven’t missed a great deal.    Berlusconi is now recognised as a trailblazer for the media-savvy demagogues who’ve won power in Western democracies in more recent years.  He was the first Italian prime minister to assume that office without prior experience in government or public administration.  Sorrentino has him say at one point ‘I wish I could run the country like my businesses’ and several times illustrates his infantile egoism .  The resonances come through loud and clear.  As a cultural phenomenon, Berlusconi is no doubt interesting to read about.  He might be an absorbing documentary subject too but he makes for an inert drama.  Not only does his inescapably strong public image dictate proceedings; the film also concentrates on a period of relative inaction in Berlusconi’s career.

    As usual, Sorrentino’s lead is Toni Servillo, who also played Andreotti and the journalist protagonist of The Great Beauty (2013).   A formidable actor, Servillo is constrained here and not just because the make-up department, carefully replicating Berlusconi’s embalmed look, seems to have encased his face:  the script doesn’t allow him to go anywhere interesting with the character either.  Perhaps the make-up has been overdone to distract attention from physical differences between the actor and the man he’s incarnating (differences that don’t reflect a substantial reinterpretation by the film of who Berlusconi is).  Though he isn’t tall (1.81m), Servillo is nowhere near as short as the real thing (1.65m); nor is he, even in the facial disguise worn here, apparently thuggish.

    It must be forty minutes or so into Loro when Berlusconi makes his first appearance.   Until then, the main character is Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) – a thirty-something businessman in Taranto who traffics young female escorts and uses them, as bribes to local politicians, in order to obtain licences for business operations run by his father (Paolo Buglioni).  Ambitious to increase his income and power, Sergio is sure that his passport to these is Berlusconi.  He has a relationship, professional and sexual, with Tamara (Euridice Axen), an unscrupulous kindred spirit, and the pair head for Rome, with a view to making contact with ‘Him Him’ (as Sergio calls the great man).

    They make useful contacts in the capital but Sergio properly comes to his idol’s attention when he rents a villa in Sardinia, which he stocks with nubile escorts, close to Berlusconi’s summer residence.  Sergio is an obvious exemplar of the values of Berlusconi’s Italy and the early part of Loro is repetitive.  Even so, as a fictional creation, this character gives Sorrentino more room for manoeuvre and Riccardo Scamarcio’s blend of sly vitality and naïveté makes you almost root for Sergio.  You certainly want to see what happens once he succeeds in making contact with Berlusconi, even though the answer turns out to be, from Sergio’s point of view, not much at all.

    Sorrentino devotes most time to describing the notorious bunga-bunga parties and their personnel, and to exploring Berlusconi’s personal insecurities.  It’s been taken as read by some critics that, in repeatedly parading nearly naked young bodies, the talented director is a moral cut above the men in the story that assemble or enjoy the girls in question.  Although the DP Luca Bigazzi does construct some aesthetically remarkable images of groups of bodies, it’s not easy to perceive what Sorrentino is intending to show below the surface or how, as some admiring reviews of Loro have claimed, this ‘riot of decadence’ is ‘satirical’.

    A general election in 2006 sent Forza Italiano and its coalition partners into opposition.  Berlusconi’s exile from power throws into relief his unhappy marriage to Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci).  Sorrentino instances his weakness in other relationships too.  An opposition senator (Lorenzo Gioielli) whose support he means to buy tells Berlusconi that he despises him for his inferiority complex.   The remark visibly hits home – as do the words of a young actress (Anna Pagani) when, later in the film, she stops Berlusconi’s attempted seduction in its tracks by telling him his breath is like her grandfather’s – not bad, just ‘old’.  These moments stand out because the details aren’t what you expect.   In contrast, the dialogue in the climactic showdown between Silvio and Veronica is unsurprising, well though the exchange is acted.

    As in The Great Beauty, Sorrentino shows a knack for conjuring up regretful atmosphere when his camera moves away from frenetic hedonism, and participants in it, to people-less images – of Roman buildings in the earlier film, of land- and seascapes in Loro.  The effect – which echoes La dolce vita, on which The Great Beauty drew in several ways – is less potent this time, though, since the regret isn’t filtered through a personality as engaging as Toni Servillo’s Jep Gambardella (let alone Marcello Mastroianni’s Marcello).  Sorrentino doesn’t skewer Berlusconi as mercilessly as he might have done but he doesn’t, of course, admire him – an attitude that limits the impact of the film he’s made.  There’s one particular sequence in the closing stages that might be powerful if Sorrentino were more ambivalent about his central character and made the audience feel likewise.  In the grounds of his home in Sardinia, Berlusconi has a fake volcano.  He keeps telling his guests that he’ll show them it in action but he never does.  Alone now in the garden, he switches on the volcano and it sputters.  So does the sequence.

    Another element in the last part of Loro, though derivative in conception, is more striking.  In April 2009, a few months after Berlusconi became prime minister again, the southern Italian city of L’Aquila was hit by a major earthquake.  In the film, Berlusconi visits the homeless locals and promises them ‘a new town’ though we hear a woman’s voice call that ‘We want Jesus Christ back’.  She is referring to a statue that stood in a church destroyed in the earthquake (as well as suggesting that some parts of Italy haven’t been as irrevocably modernised as others).  Although he’s becoming increasingly politically isolated, Berlusconi delivers on his promise to the people of L’Aquila to build new houses for them.  This is upstaged by the recovery of the statue, hoisted by firemen from the ruins of the church before being lowered carefully to the ground.  The image inevitably evokes the prologue to La dolce vita, in which a helicopter transports a statue of Christ over an ancient Roman viaduct but Sorrentino then focuses on the faces of the firemen, tired by their efforts, and continues to do so through most of the closing credits.  This compassionate fascination with people comes out of nowhere and the tonal change is arresting.  It sent me out of the cinema feeling differently from when I went in.  In spite of everything that’s wrong with Loro, its very last gasp made me curious to see what Paolo Sorrentino does next.

    6 May 2019

  • Spartacus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1960)

    Spartacus is a unique Stanley Kubrick film in two, connected ways.  First, it’s his only feature that he didn’t develop ab initio but was hired to direct (after David Lean turned the project down and Anthony Mann was fired after the first week of shooting).  Second, it’s a famous picture that plenty of people don’t realise was directed by Kubrick; some of those who do know it’s his don’t think it bears his authorial stamp.  How free a hand he was given by Universal and the film’s star Kirk Douglas remains a matter of debate; it goes almost without saying that the notoriously controlling Kubrick didn’t feel in charge as much as he wanted to be[1].  But let’s assume, to keep things simple, that he held the reins in most important respects.   On that basis, Spartacus is a fine example of what an exceptionally gifted director – with various help – can make of essentially generic material.  The genre in question is epic historical drama – to be more precise and disparaging, the Hollywood ‘toga movie’.  The various help includes a strong cast, an excellent screenplay and impressive cinematography.

    The source material of this biography of Spartacus, the leader of a slave rebellion against the Roman Republic in around 71 BCE, is a novel by Howard Fast, published in 1951.  Fast was originally commissioned to write the screenplay; when that didn’t work out, the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo took over.  (How he eventually got the screenplay credit sans pseudonym is dramatised in Jay Roach’s 2015 film Trumbo.)  Kubrick’s admirably clear storytelling was surely aided by Trumbo’s well-structured script, which includes a lot of dialogue that’s remarkable for its taut wit.  The writing of the political manoeuvring in the Roman Senate, which shows the sometimes mixed motives that propel key events, is particularly convincing.  Whether showing the rebels encamped or on the move or in battle, the cinematographer Russell Metty achieves a depth of visual field that gives a sense of huge physical scale.  After the massacre of the slave army, the line of corpses that stretches on and on is an appallingly powerful image.

    Kubrick gets especially good work from the British members of his large cast.  (Watching Spartacus makes the ponderous satirical caricatures of A Clockwork Orange and, to a lesser extent, Barry Lyndon all the harder to understand.)  As the patrician senator and would-be dictator Crassus, Laurence Olivier is often marvellous, especially in the altogether outstanding episode of Crassus’s visit – with his wife Helena (Nina Foch), her ambitious brother Glabrus (John Dall) and the latter’s wife Claudia (Joanna Barnes) – to the gladiator training centre in Capua run by the businessmen Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov).  When the wives demand fights-to-the-death, Batiatus, though reluctant not to disappoint his guests, explains that’s not how things are done at the camp.  ‘Today is an exception,’ says Olivier’s Crassus, concluding the discussion with calm and total authority.

    Two contests follow, the first involving Spartacus’s friend Crixus (John Ireland).  Kubrick shoots this imaginatively, from the point of view of the anxious Spartacus, inside a slatted wooden cage, where he and his own opponent are held until it’s their turn to fight.  Spartacus takes on the African slave Draba (Woody Strode), who disarms the hero and has him at his mercy.  As Draba pauses, Helena’s callous-verging-on-bored impatience (‘What’s the matter now?  Kill him, you imbecile!’) gives the proceedings a terrible realness and makes all the more startling Draba’s subsequent act of defiance, when he thrusts his weapon, a trident, at his demanding spectators, before being killed by an arena guard and Crassus.  The latter, until then, has watched the combat as if with his thoughts partly elsewhere, suggested by Olivier in an ingenious bit of business:  he repeatedly fiddles with the torque Crassus wears round his neck.

    His handling of the lines in the well-known ‘oysters and snails’ dialogue with Antoninus (Tony Curtis), the new slave to whom Crassus has taken a fancy, is richly entertaining.  Later on in the film, though, when he raises his voice repeatedly, Olivier is more bombastic and less compelling.  His exchanges with Gracchus (Charles Laughton), Crassus’s populist nemesis, leave you in little doubt who was the greater screen actor.  It’s not only Laughton’s bulk but also the way he inhabits a role that makes him so imposing a presence.  His readings, no less rhythmical than Olivier’s, are always strongly felt and anchored in character.  As Batiatus, Peter Ustinov gives a brilliant portrait of uneasy venality.  Ustinov illustrates the challenge, for a professional sycophant who’s also an independent intelligence, of keeping up the ingratiation non-stop.  Batiatus’s quick mind and tongue are repeatedly in competition.

    Among the few women in evidence, the main one is the slave Varinia (Jean Simmons), whom Spartacus loves and Crassus, though he buys her, unsuccessfully covets:  her heart belongs to Spartacus, whose child she bears.  Varinia’s virtuous pulchritude gives her character a more generic feel than most of the main men in the story (and Crassus’s rediscovery of her in the aftermath of the massacre of slaves is one of its more corny moments) but, if you’re looking for peerless beauty, you can’t do much better than to cast Jean Simmons and she brings authentic feeling to the role.  When Crassus tells his henchmen that their military campaign ‘is not alone to kill Spartacus – it is to kill the legend of Spartacus’, we know the campaign will fail in its larger purpose.  The individual Spartacus does die, though, by crucifixion.  Jean Simmons ensures that this is a true personal tragedy.

    In the title role, Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest performances – impressively athletic and, in the use of his face, emotionally eloquent.  His abiding tendency to force feeling comes through occasionally when Spartacus makes speeches but you believe in this man as a popular leader.  Douglas is credible and nuanced in his scenes with Jean Simmons:  the intimacy between them is unusual in an epic romance.  Otherwise, the Americans in the cast don’t fare as well as the British.  In some cases (John Dall, for example), they’re overly conscious of the relatively high-quality dialogue entrusted to them.  They deliver it as if the sole objective is to confirm that – in arch tones, without getting inside the lines.  With relatively little to say, Tony Curtis partners Olivier effectively in the bathing scene but his Bronx accent more often sounds ill at ease.  As the young Julius Caesar, John Gavin is exceedingly handsome but, even allowing that his character is influenced by elder statesmen, excessively unassuming.

    The battle scenes were shot on a plain outside Madrid with Spanish extras playing the opposing armies (including trained Spanish infantry soldiers as members of the Roman force).  The extras playing the slaves – men, women and children of various ethnicity – are such consistently interesting camera subjects that it’s hard to believe they weren’t carefully selected for the job.  There are times when Kubrick uses these faces and groupings of the slaves to almost documentary effect.  Alex North’s abundant music consistently supports the narrative:  though it often suggests a conventional historical epic, the score is occasionally sensitive as well as rousing.  It also includes overture and intermission music.  Spartacus runs a few minutes over three hours but this first-rate film never feels too long.

    4 May 2019

    [1] ‘If I ever needed any convincing of the limits of persuasion a director can have on a film where someone else is the producer and [the director] is merely the highest-paid member of the crew, Spartacus provided proof to last a lifetime’ (quoted in James Naremore’s On Kubrick (BFI, 2007)).

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