New Italian movie explores Berlusconi’s relations with women

ROME » Italian voters’ love affair with Silvio Berlusconi may be waning, judging by the slumping fortunes of his Forza Italia party in recent elections.

But Italians are invited to explore the politician’s relations with women in a new film by Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino.

The director on Wednesday described his film “Loro” (Them) as neither pro- or anti-Berlusconi — but instead tries to contemplate the “feelings” of the now 81-year-old expremier and media mogul toward his wife, who later sought a divorce, citing his keen interest in very young women.

“It is not an ideological film or a film that takes a side,” Sorrentino insisted to reporters after he screened the film in a Rome movie house. “On the contrary, it’s just the opposite.”

Instead, so far, what “hasn’t been emphasized was the dimension of the feelings that were behind the political man,” he said.

The director described his latest film as also exploring people’s fear of old age and death. “Berlusconi’s fear of old age and death is the fear we all have,” he said.

Berlusconi, who served three terms as premier, cannot currently hold office due to a tax fraud conviction, so he couldn’t run for a fourth term in March 4 elections. But he still leads the center-right political party he created in the early 1990s.

Italians were fiercely divided when Berlusconi used his media empire as a springboard into politics. Detractors feared he wanted to use his political power to protect his business interests. Admirers saw him as a fresh, straight-talking, can-do figure after decades of byzantine politics yielding short-lived governments.

Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” which won the 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, described the decadent political environment in Rome. His 2016 “Youth — La giovinezza”