Too Sorrentinian. Not so much in the direction as in the words. Il Divo is a film in which the dialogue — as often happens in Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema — seems crafted more to resonate than to mean. The lines are chiseled, ironic, self-indulgent, steeped in a theatricality that often distances rather than draws closer. In Giulio Andreotti, Sorrentino shapes a character who speaks like an oracle: every word an enigma, every line an artifice. One senses the author’s hand, his will to write, as if language itself were an act of power. Yet it is precisely here that Il Divo risks suffocating the very reality it seeks to portray. Italian politics — with all its decay and opacity — is rendered through a language that aestheticizes it, turning it into literature. The film becomes a monument to mystery — but a finely adorned one: the enigma of Andreotti turns into a verbal mask rather than a figure to be deciphered.
Too Sorrentinian. Not so much in the direction as in the words. Il Divo is a film in which the dialogue — as often happens in Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema — seems crafted more to resonate than to mean. The lines are chiseled, ironic, self-indulgent, steeped in a theatricality that often distances rather than draws closer. In Giulio Andreotti, Sorrentino shapes a character who speaks like an oracle: every word an enigma, every line an artifice. One senses the author’s hand, his will to write, as if language itself were an act of power. Yet it is precisely here that Il Divo risks suffocating the very reality it seeks to portray. Italian politics — with all its decay and opacity — is rendered through a language that aestheticizes it, turning it into literature. The film becomes a monument to mystery — but a finely adorned one: the enigma of Andreotti turns into a verbal mask rather than a figure to be deciphered.
