Bold, engrossing examination of Vatican power politics
in his majestic study of the premiership of Guilio Andreotti, Il Divo. Here he tackles Italian politics Vatican-style, as Jude Law’s Lenny Belardo is elected pontiff to the amazement of all and takes the name Pope Pius XIII. Scheming Vatican fixer Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando) thinks he can manipulate the young pope but soon finds that Pius has other ideas and intends to set out a radical agenda of his own which puts at its heart a wrathful and demanding church such as hasn’t been seen since the late middle ages. Along the way Belardo also has to deal with scandal – the so-called Kurtwell case, involving claims of sexual abuse against an American archbishop – and his own past: abandoned by his hippie parents he was raised in an orphanage run by nuns, among them his mentor Sister Mary (Diane Keaton). Flashbacks and dream sequences abound but Sorrentino’s steady hand and Law’s powerful performance keep everything moving along sweetly. An engrossing piece of storytelling and a satisfyingly bold work of film-making. Studio Canal, £17.99 Four years after he went to war-ravaged Vienna to make The Third Man – still one of the classics of post-war British cinema – director Carol Reed returned to central Europe for another rubble-strewn film involving spies, underground figures and post-conflict skullduggery. In place of late 1940s Vienna he had early 1950s Berlin, partitioned but not yet walled-in. In place of Orson Welles, Trevor Howard and Joseph Cotten he had James Mason, Claire Bloom and the wonderful Hildegarde Neff. And in place of a screenplay by Graham Greene he had one co-written by Scottish author Eric Linklater. But if that should add up to another classic it doesn’t; under Reed’s direction The Man Between throws up almost as many noirish set-pieces as The Third Man but somehow fails to match it.
Mason plays Ivo Kern, a cynical German lawyer-turned-shadowy grifter in the Russian sector who’s still married to Berliner Bettina (Neff), though she thought him dead until recently. She’s now married to British officer Martin Mallison (Geoffrey Toone) and it’s the arrival in Berlin of his sister Susanne (Bloom) that kicks off the story.
Through Kern, Susanne becomes embroiled in an East German plot to snatch the troublesome Olaf Kestner (Ernst Schroder), a sort of West German Scarlet Pimpernel. The trouble is, nobody in the east knows what he looks like.
Despite its shortcomings, the plot is diverting enough, and both the long, action-packed night chases and the scenes shot in the Soviet sector are fascinating for their evocation of a time and a place. The 2K digital restoration returns them to pristine black and white, an added bonus, and the back stories of Neff and Schroder are worth digging into as well.
He served in the German army during the war and was wounded; she dressed as a soldier during the Battle of Berlin to fight the Russians alongside her Nazi lover. He was later executed and she spent time in a Soviet prison camp. Studio Canal, £12.99 Régis Wargnier’s lush, epic 1992 drama about the end of French colonial rule in Indochina has been given the full 4K digital restoration treatment and comes to DVD on the back of a limited theatrical re-release. The film itself is mammoth – a fraction under two and a half hours – and the two disc set comes with a new, near hour-long documentary about it and (important for British viewers) its historical context. It also features interviews with its stars, most notably Catherine Deneuve.
She plays widowed plantation owner Eliane Devries, who adopts Camille (Linh Dan Pham), the orphaned daughter of two high-born Vietnamese friends, and raises her as a patrician French woman until fate (and love) intervene in the form of hot-headed French naval officer Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez).
He’s initially involved with Eliane but then falls for Camille and together they run off to join the circus – quite literally, though this circus is actually a cover for the Communist groups which will eventually wrest back control of Indochina from the increasingly weary French. A sweeping and ultimately tragic love story which doesn’t pull its punches in its examination of the injustices of colonial rule.