Il Divo (2008)

Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo concerns Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, a man who survived electoral battles, terrorist massacres, the loss of friends, and accusations of collusion with Cosa Nostra, and who appears to have survived mostly by outlasting everyone who opposed him. The film opens with a montage of corpses: journalists, generals, bankers, a former prime minister. Sorrentino shoots it all with a chilly, ornamental precision, and Toni Servillo plays Andreotti as a small, hunched, murmuring sphinx. It is a portrait of power without ideology, which is to say power as a weather system. Andreotti walked out of a screening and called the film scurrilous, then joked about wanting a share of the takings, which is the most Andreotti thing on record.

This is a political film in the older sense. It examines corruption, party rule, the pentapartito, and the mechanics by which a man who campaigns on nothing keeps winning. It does not reach for the vocabulary of contemporary social advocacy. The cast is Italian, playing Italians, and no comment is made about it. There are no LGBTQ+ threads, no feminist argument, no racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent arc. The women occupy supporting roles in a story about men in dark suits, and the film shows no interest in correcting that arrangement. History here is a knot to be examined, not a lesson to be delivered.

What remains is craft: the music, the makeup, the unnerving stillness of Servillo's face. The film took the Jury Prize at Cannes and a makeup nomination at the Academy Awards, and it earns both. There is no sermon in it. There is only a man, and a country, and the long habit of not being caught.