Reseñas de la crítica

In “Il Divo,” Sorrentino turns expert hunting dog, convincingly laying scandals of the past 40 years at Andreotti’s feet. That he does so with a bewitching combination of humor and bravado only increases his punch... [the picture's] triumph, however, isn’t simply the issues raised, but also the way Sorrentino plumbs the sphinx-like depths of Andreotti’s personality with a delightfully piquant originality that, paired with lensing evoking Sokurov and Scorsese, is little short of breathtaking.

The film proceeds like a black comedy version of "The Godfather," crossed with Oliver Stone’s "Nixon." It assembles a roll call of figures in postwar Italian politics, society and crime, uses an abundance of names and dates in captions, and makes us despair of keeping track until we realize we’re not intended to — the purpose of all these facts is simply to evoke the sheer scope and breadth of Andreotti’s machinations. The more we learn, the more fascinated we become, as Servillo portrays him as poker-faced, hunched, impassive, observing all, revealing little, wise and cynical beyond measure.

On one level, "Il Divo" is about the degree to which Andreotti and his staff greased the political machine. On another, it's about how the writer and director Paolo Sorrentino can make disco out of dissertation.

His [Sorrentino's] presentation of a series of Mafia murders best conveys his directorial personality: It's graphic and detailed, but with the suggestion that we're seeing just part of a whole panorama of human folly. One comes away with a sense of Sorrentino's disgust and also his distance, his very Italian dose of fatalism.

Servillo does such a commanding job of animating the piercing intelligence and will to power behind this impassive facade... [and] Sorrentino, who also wrote the screenplay, knows better than to think he can completely understand a man this complex, but he knows how to make him compelling, and how to entertain the audience...

You could dismiss Servillo’s portrayal as a cartoon, but the great actors, like the most brazen playwrights (and Servillo has in recent years played leading roles in Molière), know that beneath the dark surface of caricature lies a heightened and vivifying truth, as potent as fortified wine. Consume with great caution, and with joy.

Most of its real-life characters are unknown outside Italy, and the complicated, shadowy relationships among politicians, the Mafia and the Vatican are difficult to decipher. But the filmmaking is sensational. From its bizarre opening image of the migraine-prone Mr. Andreotti with acupuncture needles stuck in his head —a picture of prime minister as human porcupine that could be out of a Fellini film — “Il Divo” is a tour de force of indelibly flashy imagery.

Sorrentino’s directorial flourishes are at least partly to blame for the lack of clarity; his ornate setpieces are frequently dazzling, but as they pile up over two hours, they wind up distracting as often as they illuminate.

A baroque high comedy of endemic corruption, Il Divo doesn’t treat the early-‘90s scandal that brought down Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti—and destroyed his long-lived Christian Democrat party—as a tragedy, thriller, or tale of long-delayed comeuppance, but with resigned wit and florid caricature.

Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy, with Sorrentino deploying every formal tool in his arsenal to disrupt facile interpretations of Andreotti’s strategically opaque character.

Sorrentino’s seeming motivation for telling the story of this grandiosely corrupt politician is not to humanize but to trap. And under the pulverizing cinematic techniques of this ecstatically unforgiving filmmaker, this powerful, loathed world leader is little more than a squashed bug.

At such junctures, he barely seems interested in Andreotti per se... this is less a biopic and more a handy pretext/excuse for a director to explore the visual, compositional and editing possibilities of his chosen medium while simultaneously flirting with ostentatiously weighty issues. But Il Divo at its best represents such purely exciting, adventurously thrilling film-making that it isn't at all hard to indulge Sorrentino his flashier flights of fancy.