By Francesco Belli
The first glimpse of Andreotti is with acupuncture needles sticking out of his face in an effort to cure his migraine. After watching the film we may not need to ask ourselves why he suffers from migraine, but it makes him look like the Cenobite ‘Pinhead’ from Hellraiser, the horror film. Is Andreotti a demon? Well, according to one of his nicknames, Beelzebub, he is…
Just as a reminder, Andreotti has dominated the political stage in Italy for fifty years: seven times Prime Minister, plus twenty-one times minister. He has impersonated the Italian politics since after the end of the Second World War. Of him Margaret Thatcher said: “He seems to have a positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun”.
Andreotti-Servillo walks in the street exactly like another Italian superman, Enrico Cuccia, died in 2000 when he was 92, the ruler of the only Italian investment bank, Mediobanca, and considered the single most powerful banker in Italy for much of the postwar era. And the liaisons dangereuses (dangerous liasons) among money, politics and religion are notorious in the Italian history: Roberto Calvi, the so-called “God’s Banker”, was the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, of which the Vatican bank was the main shareholder. At 7.30 a.m. on Friday 18 June 1982 a passing postman found his body hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in the financial district of London. Calvi's clothing was stuffed with building bricks, and he was carrying around $15,000 of cash in three different currencies. Calvi had been a member of Licio Gelli's secretive masonic lodge, P2, and members of P2 referred to themselves as frati neri or "black friars". This has led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered and his body left hanging under Blackfriars Bridge as a masonic warning because of symbolism associated with the word "Blackfriars". Calvi's death was ruled as murder after two coroner's inquests and an independent investigation, and, in June 2007, five people were acquitted of his murder after a trial in Rome.
Italian history of the last fifty years is full of such “mysteries”, all depicted in the film: Aldo Moro is kidnapped and then killed by the Red Brigates; the journalist Mino Pecorelli is murdered; Giorgio Ambrosoli, Liquidating Commissioner of the Banca Privata Italiana, is killed; general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa is assassinated; Michela Sindona dies from poisoning in prison; judges Giovanni Falcone and Antonio Borsellino are assassinated. History does not tell us the truth about all this blood, while Sorrentino does… well, it is a dream-confession by Andreotti, which has never happened and never will, which makes the audience think that the only truth is depiction, at all levels. Somebody has to know, there are clues everywhere, but for a sort of superior reason of State truth is never to come to surface.
The other characters, Andreotti’s gang, look all like hungry sharks, and they were indeed. Strangely enough, in that political zoo Andreotti is the less beasty among the animals, a superhuman half God/half Demon hunted by the ghosts of his decisions and the scores of men he killed. Not by his hands, not because had them killed, just because sometimes he did not do what he could have done.
In the end the most powerful Italian politician is alone, because despite the thousands of people ha has met in his life he has no friends. And no-one knows him, not even his wife, who realises that in one of the most poetic scenes of the film.
Il Divo, then, is just another dream, its director Paolo Sorrentino’s of what truth is, as the real truth is what the courts have decided: Giulio Andreotti is innocent.
Is he?
Copyright 2008 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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