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Home » Culture and Criticism

Il divo: La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti

Submitted by on February 7, 2010 – 11:16 AM2 Comments

Facing two subtitled hours about an Italian politician I’d never heard of, merely for the sake of crossing a Best Makeup nominee off the list, I considered withdrawing from the Oscars 2010 Death Race entirely and saving myself.

andreotti-interpretato-da-servillo-per-sorrentino-1Instead, I threw Il divo on my Netflix instant queue, booted it up, and sat in front of my laptop, arms folded, giving it 10 minutes to impress me before I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.It had me by the collar in 90 seconds.

I haven’t seen a movie this ambitious and just straight-up cool-looking in a long time.Paolo Sorrentino uses a lot of tricks and showy shots, but he understands their genealogy; when the movie feels like Fellini or Coppola (the chiaroscuro lighting) or Fincher (the playful 3D captions) or Tarantino via Carnahan (the outré angles and stretching/compressing of sequences), it feels intentional.It’snot copying, or even homage — it’s mastery of tonal control.

That it’s so exciting to watch is more impressive when you realize that, as scripted, the movie is 80 percent doomy aphorisms about the nature of power and how we know ourselves — the kind of thing that reads much more profoundly 1) when it’s delivered from underneath a hood of Don-Corleone’s-study shadow, and 2) when you do literally have to read the dialogue.It’s what I call The Truffaut Test: does it still work in American English?

But Sorrentino is so good at creating a mood that the words (and the fact that they do very little to untangle the dense web of political machinations the movie is, on the surface, about) almost don’t matter.A couple of scenes clank, like the one in which Andreotti tears out a page of a book, saying he never wants to know the killer’s identity — but then so many of them call for a rewind. The still-seeming shot of an apartment building, interrupted horribly and thrillingly by a jumper rushing toward the camera at a new angle; the car swan-diving into a pit of explosives; the end-credits music choice (Trio’s “Da Da Da,” which some of you will remember from that VW commercial) — Sorrentino is daring himself to do it in a new way, and daring us to come along.

Go along.It’s fun.

Death Race 50, Sarah 8

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2 Comments »

  • Seankgallagher says:

    While I thought the movie was well done, I frankly was lost throughout, because I think Sorrentino made this for people he assumed would know about that time in Italian history, and I didn’t. I should watch it again, though.

  • Amanda says:

    Netflix kept pushing this movie on me, so I threw it in my Instant queue to watch way, way later. This review got me to move it to the top, and I watched it tonight. Glad I did. I only found the timeline kind of annoying (I might not have noticed this in an English- or Spanish-language film, to be fair) and the subtitles often overwhelmed the awesome 3D captions.

    I think I would watch it again sometime if my Netflix queue weren’t pushing the mid-hundreds. It really is a cool-looking movie and it doesn’t feel as long as it is. Also, I need the soundtrack right now.

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