Loro is a fas­ci­nat­ing, flawed look at an age­ing demagogue

Hid­den among the dunes of Sardinia’s Emer­ald Coast, just over the hill from a glis­ten­ing pink sand beach, a well-coiffed man is trapped in an improb­a­bly tiny green­house, filled with but­ter­flies and exot­ic plants. It’s the morn­ing after an extrav­a­gant par­ty and the dewy grass is cov­ered with cham­pagne corks, con­fet­ti and frilly lin­gerie. On a tram­po­line in the mid­dle of the oth­er­wise impec­ca­ble lawn, a scant­i­ly clad woman, adorned with a but­ter­fly neck­lace, lays spread out, asleep. Her body is just one among dozens of oth­ers in the gar­den, each of which is brand­ed by the same ento­mo­log­i­cal jew­ellery. Back in the glass box the man laughs as he sur­veys his king­dom of insect women, his botoxed face stretched into a dead post-coital grin.

The imagery might be stark, but those look­ing for a Sil­vio Berlus­coni hatch­et job will find lit­tle cathar­sis in Pao­lo Sorrentino’s lat­est offer­ing, Loro. The film, which was released in Italy in two parts ear­li­er this month, is less con­cerned with dish­ing out social jus­tice than ful­fill­ing its own cre­ative chal­lenge of human­is­ing a whole range of grotesque char­ac­ters and desires a new mean­ing beyond their usu­al stale media stereo­types. Italy’s ex-Prime Min­is­ter was pre­dictably quick to vocalise his objec­tions, call­ing the film a ​“vio­lent provo­ca­tion”, but lib­er­al crit­ics too have been on the attack, argu­ing that Sor­renti­no has, on the con­trary, been over­ly-gen­er­ous in fac­ing up to the lega­cy of the nation’s ulti­mate anti-hero. Pol­i­tics aside, as a por­trait of con­tem­po­rary baroque and the deca­dence and greed that char­ac­teris­es Trumpian elites around the world, the film feels like a time­ly intervention.

The film’s tech­ni­cal and visu­al strength owes a lot to Luca Bigazzi, the cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er who helped devel­op the char­ac­ter­is­tic post­mod­ern aes­thet­ics of Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Youth and The Great Beau­ty. The manda­to­ry swim­ming pool shots and Pasoli­ni-inspired close-ups are all back, accom­pa­nied this time, as is only fit­ting for a biopic of a prop­er­ty mogul, with a qua­si-erot­ic cel­e­bra­tion of sofas, cof­fee tables and plas­ma screens. In a par­tic­u­lar­ly fun anthro­po­mor­phic game, an air con­di­tion­ing unit is trans­formed into a silent assas­sin and emerges as one of the most unlike­ly and mem­o­rable characters.

As with pre­vi­ous works, the semi­otic col­li­sion between the sacred and pro­fane pro­vides an artis­tic frame­work. One mem­o­rable exam­ple is a din­ner scene with Berlus­coni and his myr­mi­dons, which is filmed like the Last Sup­per but set to house beat. The end result resem­bles a kitch aper­i­ti­vo buf­fet dur­ing Milan fash­ion week. This is well-trod­den ter­ri­to­ry, but pulled off with real panache.

Sor­renti­no is often accused of being super­fi­cial, but there is a more pre­cise vision pow­er­ing Loro. The film is a med­i­ta­tion on real­i­ty and illu­sion, and the way mon­ey so often blurs the two as a kind of nihilis­tic force, hol­low­ing out the nature of mean­ing itself. In part one, Berlus­coni is almost entire­ly absent; instead we dwell among the pimps, show­girls and dodgy busi­ness­men who want to get their own piece of the pie, pro­ject­ing a god­like sta­tus onto their leader in the process. When we final­ly do see him, it is almost underwhelming.

This isn’t the fault of Toni Servil­lo, who plays the role with great skill, but a clear direc­to­r­i­al deci­sion. ​‘Il Cav­a­liere’ just doesn’t quite live up to the hype. This point is rein­forced in part two, which by con­trast tells the sto­ry of an age­ing dem­a­gogue, reflect­ing on pre­cise­ly this truth: on his life choic­es, his van­i­ty, his col­laps­ing mar­riage and shit­ty friends. Sorrentino’s Berlus­coni is a man who claims to love his coun­try but knows he has failed it, who con­stant­ly repeats the mantra ​“I am nev­er offend­ed” to the point it is clear he is. When a teenage girl turns down his advances because his deodor­ant ​“smells like grand­dad” there is pain in the old man’s eyes.

Sorrentino’s spec­u­la­tive fas­ci­na­tion with Berlusconi’s per­son­al life does raise some prob­lems. Pow­er rela­tions are explored, cer­tain­ly, and Ele­na Sofia Ricci’s per­for­mance as the actress and Berlusconi’s ex-wife Veron­i­ca Lario is one of the strongest of the film, but how, he seems to pause, can any­one deny the plea­sure of exposed but­tocks? Alas the cri­tique seems to stop here. In anoth­er scene, when an earnest brown-suit­ed left-wing politi­cian accepts an invi­ta­tion to come to the island, he is made to con­form to all the Berlus­con­ian stereo­types of ​‘bor­ing’ democ­rats, a stuffy anachro­nism in a daz­zling fan­ta­sy world.

Even when Sor­renti­no does turn his atten­tion to the nation­al apoc­a­lypse that’s unfold­ing, he does so in a cheap, melo­dra­mat­ic way. In one scene a bus veers off the road in cen­tral Rome and bursts into flame while a crowd of show­girls look on, blankly. The Ital­ian peo­ple are por­trayed as con­fused sheep, wil­ful­ly being led to the slaugh­ter. Giv­en the patience with which Sor­renti­no decon­structs Berlusconi’s neu­roses, it is curi­ous that no such sub­tle­ty afford­ed to the mogul’s critics.

At its core, Loro is the sto­ry of a man who can only exist as a per­for­mance, a man who in many respects is like an actor, an artist, a direc­tor of sorts him­self. In Sorrentino’s hands Berlus­coni is not just a fig­ure who vin­di­cates a nation of secret per­verts, he is a magi­cian who makes a whole new world seem pos­si­ble pre­cise­ly when it is not. He is a nar­cis­sist who believes is his own non­sense most but not all of the time, a human in the jaws of death, like the rest of us. Loro is far from Sorrentino’s best work, but watch­ing the direc­tor grap­ple with his own his masochis­tic desire to sym­pa­thise with the dev­il is fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, if a tad self-indulgent.