SILVIO SCREEN
LORO Paolo Sorrentino and Toni Servillo reunite for a tale of Italy’s controversial former leader…
I Aworld leader with a lackadaisical approach to the job, an affinity for scandal, immense personal wealth and a dodgy hairdo. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film is actually about Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal-beset former prime minister of Italy, who held power in three spells between 1994 and 2011.
It’s not your typical political drama. This is the story of a PM better known for his ‘bunga bunga’ parties than his policies. It’s a story of excess, involving drug-taking, prostitution, corruption and hedonism. “Aside from the very well-known things about Berlusconi that I was not interested in, there are a lot of facts about Berlusconi that were not very well-known,” Sorrentino tells Teasers when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018, where a new international cut of Loro has just played (it was previously released in two parts in Italy).
So what drew the Italian auteur to Berlusconi? “I was fascinated by the biographies written by people who knew Berlusconi as a businessman, before he basically shifted his approach to the sale of ads into the political arena – by selling dreams, or by selling illusions,” he says. Sorrentino also wanted to get under the skin of a man who presents “a rather sugar-coated emotional portrait
of himself… which cannot be truthful”. Sorrentino casts his Il Divo star Toni Servillo in a dual role (as Berlusconi and a business partner), and says that the script was written hand-in-hand with a legal team checking facts. He also met the man himself before he made the film. “When a person knows that they’re going to be put on screen, they always present a glossy image of themselves,” he says. “I know it’s all a pose, and so I’m not interested in what they say. I’m interested in the small but significant details.”
And as for the critics who think that Sorrentino doesn’t go tough enough on Berlusconi? “That’s not the motivation for me to make a film – the desire to attack a person,” he asserts. “I think that a film should have a symbolic force. Otherwise, you might as well print a political paper.”
ETA | 19 April / loro opEns nExT monTh.