He has been one of the most influential Italian politicians, whit a career that started in 1948 when he was elected for the first time at the age of 29.
Il Divo tells of a part of his 40-year career, between 1991 and 1993, when Andreotti was head of government for the seventh time and he was going to be investigated for suspicious links with the mafia.
Watching this outstanding movie, just one doubt comes up: will it be enough to make sense to the British audience?
There are two sorts of difficulties. Firstly, Andreotti is a man who seems incomprehensible even to his wife and his closest collaborators.
He is known by Italian people with several nicknames like ‘Divo Giulio’, which comes from Julius Caesar and means the importance of his authority, or ‘Beelzebub’ because of his alleged mafia links, but nobody has been able to pin him down totally.
Secondly, the movie aims at emphasizing his potential involvement in many important and dark happenings of Italian recent history, like mafia murders, terrorism and scandal bound up with Freemasonry, that are not clear either for many Italian people.
The director Paolo Sorrentino, who shot The Consequences of Love in 2004 and The Family Friend in 2006, portrays Andreotti like the personification of power, through the reconstruction of his meetings with mafia boss and high points like when he accepts to be nominated as President of Republic.
Thanks to the masterly performance of Toni Servillo, which won him the European Film Award, Andreotti - who is now senator for life since 1991 - is represented as a man who lives alone with his power and who lives for it, to the point of saying during a final monologue “you sometimes have to do evil in order to do good”.
So he appears as quiet as strong on taking his decision, as devout as calculating when he thinks about what he has to do, as fatherly with his voters as astute on achieving his purposes.
Like in a sort of revenge against a powerful man famous for his ironic sharp tongue, Sorrentino even enjoyed himself showing Andreotti, who served as Primer Minister seven times and 25 as minister, in a ridiculous way like when her secretary told him to stand erect despite being hunchbacked.
Il Divo is an intense movie, with a fast-paced editing that catches the most inattentive member of the audience, though the story demands at least a slight knowledge of Italian recent history to be comprehensible.
The jury of the Cannes Film Festival awarded Il Divo with its special price in 2008: maybe it is going to have seconds with the British audience.
Il Divo: 2008, Italy/France, Articial Eye, 110 mins, Biopic, in Italian with English subtitles. Director: Paolo Sorrentino.
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