Thanks to the Boston Phoenix for linking!

I’d been planning a post on Attack the Block, the brilliant UK sci-fi film, and Misfits, e4′s hit teen series, before I read about parts of London spuriously rioting in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan. When I read the youth of London were enraged, seemingly out of the blue, I wondered if I’d stumbled on a strange coincidence.

Attack the Block is a lively, humorous and dark tale of Moses and his friends, a multicultural group of teens who live in the projects of London. One day, after mugging a nice white lady, Sam, the youth realize aliens are falling from the sky. Soon it becomes increasingly clear the aliens are going for the ‘hood. It’s a brilliant conceit. Sci-fi films almost always focus on the richer areas of their home countries — Manhattan, the Capitol, central London. From Independence Day to Harry Potter, it’s much more gripping to see areas people actually care about go down in flames. Besides, the thinking goes, isn’t that the way it would happen in real life?

Similarly, Misfits, now on Hulu, focuses on the peculiar fusion of the supernatural and the derelict. A band of mostly working class British youth, two black and three white, get hit with a cosmic storm and have to decide whether to use their powers for the public good or for themselves.

Both properties share, artistically, an accomplished use of slang and vernacular and a witty, ironic sensibility. Both are funny and frightening. But their deepest connection is the theme of societal rejects learning to become full citizens, to participate appropriately in society.

The series are fantasy, and that’s the appeal. Because the truth of England, we have now seen, is these “misfits” aren’t participating fully in the riches of society. England has enjoyed over a decade of tremendous growth, at least for the rich, but Tottenham, the multicultural area of London where the riots began, has high unemployment.

(Spoilers ahead).

These forgotten areas, located in incredibly wealthy countries, face disproportionate policing — a vibrant theme in Attack the Block – and more interactions with the nanny-state — Misfits centers on the mandatory community service of its juvenile delinquents.

The fantasy of Attack the Block and Misfits is that, in the end, if you’re poor, of color, and/or underemployed, you can eventually become a hero. Attack the Block‘s Moses saves London. One of the final images even has him dangling, twenty stories high, from the British flag! While being escorted to jail by the police, the film has the whole neighborhood chanting his name. (Prophetically, the block’s chanters are chanting both in praise of Moses but also — this is key — against the police). Misfits‘ protagonists take longer to realize their potential, but by the end of the second season, the writers suggest they’ve learned their lessons and have decided to become heroes. Though hopefully season three will complicate that.

What’s revolutionary about these shows is they tap into the rage of the underclass while still capturing the joy, sex and wit which give their lives pleasure and hope.

What they miss, though, is assimilation is not so easy, especially in the face of widespread indifference. To be fair, both Joe Cornish (writer-director, Attack the Block) and Howard Overman (creator, Misfits) forestall their eventual happy endings as long as possible. Misfits is as much about what the kids do wrong as right. Moses’ redemption, leading the projects to the promised land, comes at the tail end of Attack the Block, and not before he and his friends deliver impassioned and realistic critiques of the police and middle class London.

We academics would describe Attack the Block and Misfits‘ tendency to highlight exemplary individuals — here, supernatural! — amidst overwhelming social and economic neglect as a symptom of neolliberalism, a sloppy word whose definition few people fully understand, myself included. But the story goes something like this: beginning in full force under the conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher, various governments started to de-invest in social programs, emphasizing policies intended to enrich the upper strata with hopes those benefits would trickle down. To make it from the bottom, you had to be special.

Now in 2011, though it clearly hasn’t worked, both Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama (held hostage by Republicans and Bush policies), aren’t changing course, at least not fast enough.

This has left wide swathes of the US and UK populations underemployed for decades, many of them are disproportionately of color. Black asset growth in the US is either unchanged or down from the 1980s, while the majority haven’t done as bad. Unemployment for urban, working class youth are many times the reported national figures.

In the face of such realities, worsened by unequal policing — the drug war, which Obama is doubling down on, is the main culprit — what’s a youth left to do? If you’re in the movies, luckily you’ll probably get superpowers and be awesome. If you live in the real world, eventually there’s nothing left to do except scream.

That said, you should really watch Attack the Block and Misfits. They are things of beauty. For the latter, ignore the rape-y subplot because it’ll go away; for the former, read the ending as more hope than reality, or a sign that the publicly-supported producers didn’t want to piss off the state too much.

The kids are doing it for them, anyway.

Number Two: “Let’s make a deal. You cooperate, tell us what we want to know, and this could be a very nice place. You may even be given a position of authority.”

Patrick McGoohan (Number Six): “I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.”

Number Two: “Is it?”

Patrick McGoohan (Number Six): “Yes. You won’t hold me.”

From The Prisoner (1967), to watch the full series online for free, visit AMC.com

This exchange hails from the original British series, The Prisoner (1967), in which Patrick McGoohan, playing a character named Number Six, finds himself imprisoned in an old-style village. The opening sequence of the series has him driving around London in a fast car, driving up to his employer’s desk and slapping down a letter of resignation. He has been brought to this presumably secluded village because he has valuable information — what this information is, we don’t know. We also don’t know McGoohan’s occupation. All we know is that he’s trapped because he’s left his job, and he wants to leave.

(When the original series premiered, many viewers assumed, and perhaps were meant to assume, that McGoohan’s character was John Drake, whom he played in another British import, Danger Man (Secret Agent). This, however, was left ambiguous in The Prisoner, though American media magazines like Time and TV Guide stated the two were one in the same.)

Who is the prisoner? Who are his captors? What information does he hold? Will he ever be free? Now that AMC is remaking The Prisoner, viewers will have another chance to find out. Though, of course, they won’t. Nevertheless, in the age of Lost and Flash Forward, the remake of The Prisoner may be right on time, instead of light years ahead of it, as it was in 1967.

Number Six:

“I am not a number. I am a person.”

The original series, best remembered for its ambiguity, cinematic techniques, and thought-provoking final episode, plays heavily on the fears of its time. It’s steeped in the rhetoric of the Cold War. The village is the commune, or the communist society, where names don’t matter and everyone pretends to be happy in public but is miserable in secret. Though all of their needs are provided for, there is no joy, and the only hope of climbing the social ladder is to be given a position by authorities. The philosophical and psychological drama of the show is whether McGoohan is in fact a free, autonomous individual — “my life is my own” — or whether he in fact is “a number” (communist!) not a “person.”

Thus The Prisoner (1967) played upon fears of communism and its homogenizing, anti-freedom forces, at least in the beginning of the series. Of course, giving the ambiguity in the show, the village could in fact be in a capitalist country, and McGoohan in fact living in a hell supported by capital not socialism. But I doubt many viewers saw it this way, at least at first. Number Six becomes more of a hero as the series progresses, allowing other people in the village to escape, but not escaping himself. Network executives wanted the audience to have someone to identify with. Americans must have identified with McGoohan as the free-thinking capitalist crusading against the monolith of communism.

Jeffrey S. Miller, in his book on British television imports in America, Something Completely Different, says The Prisoner is open to interpretation, and appealed both to conservative middle class people and young leftists attracted to the idea of revolting against the system. Indeed, embedded within the critique of communism is a critique of consumerism and technocracy — all the village’s denizens are colorfully dressed and lived in well-decorated homes. The series concludes on an ambiguous, Rorschach-like note; depending on your political proclivities, Number Six has either become free or remains imprisoned (my money’s on the countercultural reading)

Now AMC has remade The Prisoner with Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel; the series debuts November 15.

Judging by the promos, it seems AMC is keeping the original theme of the show, freedom and individuality vs. collectivity and imprisonment. It appears they’re leaning toward “not free:” “You only think you’re free.”

How is this going to play in a post-Cold War era? I’m not sure. Certainly the Mad Men-watching aesthetes might be interested, if only intellectually.

The question of freedom is always relevant, but who is the enemy? The internet, which gives the promise of complete freedom but is still dominated by big corporations? That’s not very interesting. Maybe it’s the U.S. government, who, even in the Obama age, is still keeping state secrets and negotiating with Wall Street? That doesn’t feel as resonant as in the Bush era. Certainly there is the issue of terrorism and the fundamentalism, which AMC may not shy away from.

For my part, it looks to me that the village in AMC’s The Prisoner will recall much more viscerally the suburbs of Levittown, making the prison not a foreign land, but the homes of the show’s viewers (although, as said before, the original did this as well). Is America free? Having an American actor as Number Six (instead of the British McGoohan) goes a long way in driving this point home.

Quite frankly, I’m rather excited about the remake. The Prisoner (1967) is an important show in television history. It deserves credit for foregrounding contemporary cerebral mysteries like Lost and Flash Forward. It’s a real challenge to the narrative that television today is more engaging and intellectual than it has ever been (a narrative I’ve used myself). For the sixties, it was an incredibly avant-garde show.

As I mentioned before, AMC is releasing the entire original series online and on OnDemand.

Many thanks to Thessaloniki Film Festival for linking! This post in honor of Il Divo opening in Philadelphia at one of the Ritz theatres.

Cinema loves impenetrable men. Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, a film forever collecting critical largess, proves this. So do other protagonists in other evidently great films, including Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2, not to mention less prestigious action heroes like James Bond, among dozens more and not all of them British. The trope persists: Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men are two recent instantiations. It is so pervasive that similarly opaque female leads become all the more outstanding: from Jean Seberg in Breathless, Tracy Camilla Johns in She’s Gotta Have It to Kate Winslet in The Reader.

From my eyes, Italian and internationally acclaimed film director Paolo Sorrentino is very aware of this history. His films, including Il Divo, now out in limited release, The Family Friend (2006), The Consequences of Love (2004) and L’uomo in più (2001), all focus on lonely often steely men undergoing existential crises. These are among the few of his films available for consumption in the United States (some are not subtitled, not formatted for the US or released on DVD). I’ll join the chorus of critics clamoring for full release of his work, which seems inevitable, given that Il Divo captured the Jury Prize at Cannes, and all three were nominated for the Palme D’Or.

Tony Servillo as Giulio Andreotti in Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (2008), likely to become Sorrentino masterpiece for its depiction of a man tenaciously trying to contain himself and his power.

Why now? Why Sorrentino? He happens to be half the duo of directors causing some critics to declare a revival in Italian cinema – Matteo Garrone is the other – both critically and commercially. The reasons are in the films.

Without a doubt, this Neapolitan director crafts visually arresting films. Il Divo, out recently in theatres and now poised to be his Citizen Kane, lest he direct something more ambitious, is a great film, filled as it is with majestic and arresting shots. Based on the late life of Italian politician and powerbroker Giulio Andreotti, who for decades has held what appears to be every major position in the Italian government, including prime minister, and with strong connections to the mafia, is a notorious figure in the country. Sadly, few know of him here, so for a lay American audience Il Divo may be a vexingly complicated film. It is littered with names and references, nearly all of whom are completely meaningless to those who don’t know the story. The removed Andreotti, well-portrayed by Sorrentino’s apparent muse, Tony Servillo, who has helmed several of his films and also stars in another recent acclaimed Italian film, Gomorrah, is quiet; the audience gets little insight into his psyche or plans. Yet it has been awhile since I saw a film after which I felt the need to see it again, not only to get the story straight but to enjoy it more than the first time. With a clear handle on the plot, the film is near-visionary.

Sorrentino knows how to entertain, provoke and inspire, a feat few directors can achieve at the same time – the most notable and consistently of which is Martin Scorsese, to whom Sorrentino is cousin. With his elegant, swooping tracking shots, sustained close-ups, disorienting angles and expansive color palette, Sorrentino’s films – particularly Il Divo – feel active, even when nothing is happening. I cannot forget a short scene in Il Divo when Andreotti, seemingly tormented by the sins of his past and fearful of his coming future, paces about in the darkness of his own home. He is motionless except the brisk movement of his legs. His pacing is fast, easily deemed insane except for his obvious self-control (is it repression?). It is one of several scenes that give Il Divo a irrational quality – yet another reason to compare Sorrentino to Fellini [1] — yet, in its “poetic reordering of the world,” is visceral enough to deflect accusations of excess. [2]

Sorrentino’s depiction of loneliness, even when surrounded by people, recalls that of Antonioni's La Notte (1961).

An insomniac leads Sorrentino’s 2004 film, Consequences of Love, a film more appropriate for international audiences, given its simpler narrative. Here, Titta Di Giroiamo (Tony Servillo), channeling Mastroianni in La Notte, is an ex-broker living an imprisoned life. Titta’s closed-in lifestyle, which he has led for 10 years, makes him seem cold and emotionless. Like the couple at the center of La Notte, he is a man “destroyed by the indifference of habit and an impenetrable loneliness.” [3] Indeed, Titta’s solitude slows first half of the film, but it is not dull because, once again, Sorrentino can visually excite. The quiet in the first half is necessary, if only to underscore the subtle yet deep change he will undergo. Throughout the film, we see the life he has constructed (later we find out it was constructed for him) slowly fall apart, he comes undone and his reserve takes on new meaning. It is spectacularly well-crafted. Unlike Il Divo‘s Andreotti, who in the end triumphs in his struggles – in real life, he remains relatively unscathed – Titta is fictional, so his character’s emotional journey is more pronounced, making Consequences of Love a more emotionally rich film, and thus, in my current opinion, a better one.

I do not place all the blame on Sorrentino. Il Divo commands higher prestige because it is political, Machiavellian, notorious and internationally significant. The grandness of Andreotti equals that of Charles Foster Kane. With grandiosity comes austerity, however. Andreotti is given one scene to emote fully, and even then his speech is less an intimate soliloquy than an invective writ large. Consequences is narrowly constructed and personal. There are no more than ten auxiliary characters in Consequences who impact Titta and knowing their names is unnecessary; in Il Divo I lost count. Titta’s life is simple. He lives in a hotel room no bigger than a standard apartment. Andreotti’s house is a Baroque fantasy brimming with self-importance. Fiction allowed Sorrentino to keep his story under control, almost stubbornly simple.

Yet not all of his films are so evidently profound. L’uomo in più, while terrific, approaches simple melodrama, saved by assured directing and a revealing monologue at the end. L’uomo‘s men – hedonist lounge singer Tony and quietly penchant Antonio, kindred brothers of sorts headed inescapably toward destruction – are warmer and more accessible than those of Consequences and Divo. This is intentional, and perhaps the evidence lies in the differences between Tony and Andreotti’s final monologues. At the end of L’uomo, Tony (Tony Servillo) delivers one last “public confession” after he avenges Antonio’s suicide. Andreotti, in Il Divo, also delivers a spirited defense of his moral universe. Tony’s monologue is filmed with a series of slow, rotating tracking shots, easing into a final close-up. Sorrentino’s Andreotti monologue is sharp and visually disjointed, meant to give us unease. Each is appropriate for each movie. Tony ends the film a happy man: one of the last scenes has him rowing his boat away from the police, the sun shining behind him before he jumps in the water, smiling. Andreotti is stoic and emotionless in the end; he lives only to survive and maintain power. There is no sentiment there.

Geremia De Geremei is an impenetrable character. Here in The Family Friend's final shot he dons sunglasses at night as if to ward off interpretation.

The Family Friend’s Geremia De Geremei (Giacomo Rizzo), a loan shark who preys on those unfortunate enough to need fast money, also fights against our sentiments. Sorrentino fashions him a hunchback, limping with a heavy coat draped over his broken arm. Geremia doesn’t believe in God and has little regard for marriage; he raped a woman on her wedding day in exchange for lowering her father’s interest rate; he groped the wife of a debtor with him in the next room, merely to fetch her wedding ring hidden in her pocket; women are objects to him, except for his mother, with whom he shares a strange, almost Freudian relationship. He is monstrous, though not inhuman (as he is called and calls himself) because in the end we pity him even if we do not fully understand him. Sadness fuels his usury; he is a man who has stopped believing in his dreams, and when he tries to fulfill them, in all their depravity, he gets burned. He finally questions his existence and his reliance on cynicism. “There is a limit,” he concludes about the “badness” in his life, but “I don’t know.” The Family Friend is closest to Il Divo in tone, focused as it is on a sinister incomprehensible man. It completes the trajectory from L’uomo to Il Divo: his protagonists become increasingly difficult to redeem as the films become ever more complex and intractable.

Few films so clearly announce an auteur. Aside from the fact that Sorrentino writes and directs his movies, his attention to detail and concern for camerawork coax and taunt us toward auteur theory. While I have no personal stake in whether films are authored by the director or by collaborative enterprises, the clear consistency and effectiveness of Sorrentino’s style is self-evident. If anything he is a consummate manager. From his selection of music – variously infectious, trendy, surprising, haunting or whimsical – to his attention to tone, he choreographs his movies well enough to earn his acclaim, even if the credit is shared, as it naturally must be.

Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963). In his stylistic portrayal of a man who is stranger unto himself, Sorrentino's films recall that of Fellini's masterpiece.

It is easy to compare Sorrentino to canonized Italian directors like De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni. Tony Servillo himself recalls a modern day Mastroianni with more range, encouraging comparisons to the latter two directors. These comparisons are not without merit. Like those greats, Sorrentino never relinquishes control over the images; everything is tightly constructed and the camera well-controlled. [4]  Its a style that works well with stoic and emotionally unavailable male leads: Antonio Ricci in The Bicycle Thief, Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita, Giovanni Pontano in La Notte are all versions of the same man, lost and looking but unable to capture their desires. If we don’t know them it’s because they do not want us to. Sorrentino made a smart move when he veered away from the less austere leads of L’uomo in più; his newer films have more heft.

My focus on classic Italian cinema only works to place Sorrentino in historical context. In truth he has much more in common with the more style-driven auteurs working today, including Scorsese, Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar Wai, a familiar list of directors known for combining a concern for shot construction, camera discipline and subtle but effective lighting with solid plotting and memorable protagonists.  Sorrentino’s “emphatic dolley” [5] shots and pans all place him comfortably in conversation with Scorsese and Anderson. Yes, he is among many to exploit the emotive capabilities of such camera tricks, but coupled with his taste for existential drama, it becomes a rare, gripping combination.

Comparisons aside, Sorrentino has already cemented his own place among Europe’s all-star legion of directors. No doubt the critical establishment is waiting with bated breath for the next existential drama he plans to unleash upon the world.
_______________________

NOTES

[1] “The domain of the irrational is, for Fellini, the ultimate source of artistic inspiration and creativity.” Bondanella, Peter E. 2002. The films of Federico Fellini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113.

[2] Andre Bazin said that of Fellini and realism: “One might say that Fellini is not opposed to realism, any more than he is to neorealism, but rather he achieves it surpassingly in a poetic reordering of the world.” Bazin, Andre. 2004. What is cinema?. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 89.

[3]Bondanella, Peter E. 2001. Italian cinema: from neorealism to the present. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 214.

[4] De Sica too obsessively planned their images, but in ways to conceal “the art that went into its making.” Sorrentino is the opposite. His effort is everywhere on the screen. Marcus, Millicent Joy. 1986. Italian film in the light of neorealism. Princeton University Press, 56-57.

[5] A phrase borrowed from Matt Zoller Seitz. “The Substance of Style, Pt. 2.” Moving Image Source. April 3 2009. http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-2-20090403#.

Summer Hours (dir. Olivier Assayas)

Summer Hours tackles surprisingly rich themes for its superficially stereotypical setting and concerns. (Grade: A-)

The marketing for Summer Hours traffics in well-worn French clichés: a summer house in the south, plenty of wine, and well-aged French people with useless jobs in the arts, academy and design. There are museums. There are disputes over what to do with expensive artwork.

But writer-director Olivier Assayas digs much deeper, making Summer Hours, now out in limited release, the most surprising movie I’ve seen so far this year. Assayas, equally at home with spectacle (Irma Vep), grit (Clean, Demonlover) and quiet romance (Sentimental Destinies), is one of the more limber directors working today; not an auteur, but assured nonetheless.

I thought I’d see a thoughtless, sunny French drama. Not so. Moving calmly but never slacking, Summer Hours manages to pack a lot in. It is a family drama first. It follows the problems of Frédéric (Assayas favorite Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) as they grapple with the death of their mother, Helene, and the granduncle and world-famous artist Paul Berthier. They have to figure out what to do with their mother’s things, a house full of expensive and culturally significant works of art and furniture collected and created by Berthier. It’s so important the French government gets involved. Frédéric wants to keep their summer house with all its valuables, but Adrienne and Jérémie have other lives, marriages, children and jobs that take them outside of France and around the world. Frédéric teaches economics in France; he’s not going anywhere.

It sounds simple, maybe kind of boring. But it becomes rich. Summer Hours is about generational shifts. Their mother, Helene, lived in old France, where people painted gardens and sat at home. Her kids, however, live in a global world—Adrienne makes minimalist, mass-produced designer housewares, not her mother’s intricate silver teakettles—and they only visit the summer house twice a year. At the end of the film Frédéric’s teenage kids use the summer house one last time to throw a big party: smoking pot and listening to hip-hop, unaware of the history that’s gone by (a scene lyrically filmed with dignity in slow, sparsely-edited shots). History is ravenous, the movie suggests, and they are very few people who care to remember. Frédéric’s daughter, despite appearances, does. She seems to mourn the loss of her grandmother’s home. Those who do remember take it to heart.

So Summer Hours grapples with mortality. The mother has an interesting philosophy on life. When she dies, she says, the kids can sell all the objects in the house because they are filled with her memories, which die with her. She seems at peace with the fact that people won’t know her secrets—including a juicy family scandal—and all the memories that will go with her. She obviously wants her kids to know her history: she tells Frédéric many times about all the objects in the house, where they come from and what they’re worth. But she’s realistic. Death is death. History is unbiased.

Assayas reaches beyond quaint themes of family and death, though. He tackles globalization with Jérémie, who makes sneakers in China. Adrienne’s business is global as well, and her designs need to be minimalist enough to cross boundaries. All of their children look to America for inspiration; they go to English schools. They have no attachments to France. This is what globalization looks like on the ground. Their dead painter-uncle, the hidden center of all the drama, is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, which leads to arguments over whether his works should remain at home in France. France wants the notebooks of Paul Berthier. The Americans (Christie’s), they say, will “rip it up” and auction it off to the highest bidder. The question is raised implicitly: Is this the end of France? The breaking down of the house and the selling of its assets feels like the death of a kind of nostalgia for old France: bucolic, and withered at the walls of globalization. The house and the dead mother become elegantly metaphorical.

There is so much more in the film—the economic collapse, memory, even the sanctity of the art object—that makes Summer Hours feel more alive and bracing than it actually looks like on the surface. It is so elegant and delicate in its direction; Assayas cleverly masks all the drama and pathos driving his characters’ emotions and curious actions. Much more than your typical frothy French bobo flick.

Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas. IFC Films, 103 minutes. Now playing in limited release.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgtSFTidzWc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Aymar Jean Christian

Il Divo is the best political mafia movie in years. (Grade: A-)

Visit Splice Today

It’s a cliché to label directors as sons and daughters of other ones, but it seems appropriate in the case of Paolo Sorrentino, because his films are so concerned with style—lighting, framing, camerawork—and creating a viewing experience that his technique instantly recalls classics. Sorrentino is the celebrated director from Europe you haven’t heard of. After you see Il Divo, out this week in only one theater, and I hope with plans for more, you’ll remember his name.

Most people compare his style to that of Martin Scorsese. It’s an appropriate comparison. Sorrentino loves to swoop into scenes with a dramatic flourish, zooming into characters’ faces clockwise and counterclockwise. His focus on bad men and the mob also begs the comparison to Scorsese and Orson Welles, perhaps also Brian DePalma. All three know how to depict the rage and angst of men whose worlds are filled with chaos, violence and misdeeds. His prior films—including L’uomo in piu (Man on Top), The Family Friend, andConsequences of Love—showcase leading men who have committed a wrong or whose lives are surrounded by despair. Sound dreary? None of them are. One word consistently applied to Sorrentino’s work is “stylish.” You will never be bored watching his films. He has the gift of Scorsese and Wes Anderson: he’s able to create a film technically sophisticated and wildly entertaining. Sadly, many are not available in US-formatted DVD.

Il Divo is the story of Giulio Andreotti, one of Italy’s most notorious politicians who has held numerous top positions in the government, including prime minister, and whose tenacious hold on power and connections to the mob (and high profile deaths and assassinations) make him a figure readymade for the Citizen Kane treatment. Sorrentino has fun with Andreotti, as much fun as can be had with a murderous and power-hungry despot; he films Andreotti’s inner circle, mostly political henchmen, in mob movie fashion, using red subtitles to announce their names and nicknames.

But the movie is ultimately serious. Andreotti (Tony Servillo, who has starred in many of Sorrentino films) is stoic, near emotionless throughout. He is banal, like a German SS guard, and, like those guards, evil. Weighed down by years of wrongdoing, Sorrentino—who writes and directs most of his movies—suggests he’s grappling with guilt: an opening shot zooms into Andreotti with acupuncture needles in his face. Another memorable scene has Andreotti pacing about his house like a madman, driven to insanity by his crimes.

Andreotti is the apotheosis of Sorrentino’s maddening protagonists. In The Family Friend, a loan shark similarly feels enslaved by his crimes—rape and usury chief among them. Not as impenetrable as Andreotti, the loan shark is a monstrous old man—almost literally a hunchback—who we manage to pity for his incredible loneliness and allergy to virtue. In Consequences of Love, Sorrentino brings us a man enslaved by his own trials with the mob who must learn to open his life to other people. We never really “know” these men, but Sorrentino draws us into their stories visually and makes us care, at least, about what happens to them, even if we hope they fail.

Il Divo is infectious; the music is fantastic, diverse and stimulating, the editing sharp. It has a major flaw, but one with a solution: for American audience members new to Andreotti’s story, the film can be irritatingly unclear: Sorrentino assumes his audience is generally familiar with main characters and the general story. I had a terrible time following the jumps in time and certain plot details. I strongly suggest anyone planning to see the movie spend 30 minutes with Google and Wikipedia to become familiar with Italian politics and government, Andreotti, his history and his close associates. It is a must.

That said, Il Divo is the most exciting political drama I’ve seen in years. Inventive and bracing, it is latest installment from one of the best filmmakers working today.