Loro

A par­tial­ly fic­tion­alised por­trait of Sil­vio Berlus­coni in the years lead­ing into his final stint as Italy’s Prime Min­is­ter, Pao­lo Sorrentino’s lat­est project was released in his home coun­try as two sep­a­rate fea­tures, with a trun­cat­ed mash-up ver­sion mak­ing its way to the UK.

About an hour of mate­r­i­al is lost in this com­bined cut, and while this review comes from a place of hav­ing only expe­ri­enced the short­er edit, it is very evi­dent after a cer­tain point that many sto­ry­lines and arcs estab­lished ear­ly in Loro will receive next to no pay off.

Say­ing that, since this ver­sion still clocks in at near­ly two and a half hours, it feels safe to say that the weak bite in its, at times, strange­ly sen­ti­men­tal and soft-edged treat­ment of the noto­ri­ous Berlus­coni, prob­a­bly wouldn’t gain sharp­er teeth with that extra hour.

Sorrentino’s reli­able reg­u­lar lead­ing man Toni Servil­lo plays Berlus­coni with a per­ma-mask of shit-eat­ing grin, bring­ing to mind stand-up Dylan Moran’s great descrip­tion of the fig­ure as, ​“so thor­ough­ly cor­rupt, every time he smiles an angel gets gon­or­rhoea.” The direc­tor ini­tial­ly treats him as a Gats­by-like fig­ure as we fol­low swin­dling busi­ness­man, Ser­gio (Ric­car­do Sca­mar­cio), for near­ly an hour as he manoeu­vres into a sphere of polit­i­cal influ­ence with the allure of sex, drugs and glam­our to schmooze his way inside.

This leads to rent­ing a vil­la near Berlus­coni in order to get his atten­tion with a drug-fuelled orgy – result­ing an extend­ed set piece with the most leery male-gaze stag­ing this side of an Abdel­latif Kechiche joint.

Just as Ser­gio gets Berlusconi’s atten­tion, Sor­renti­no los­es his own towards the for­mer, vir­tu­al­ly leav­ing him and a few com­pelling sup­port­ing play­ers behind to focus sole­ly on the bil­lion­aire media magnate’s schemes to regain power.

The film’s even­tu­al tran­si­tion into chastis­ing the hedo­nism in which its has been rev­el­ling is just as awk­ward as the slack nar­ra­tive. As a vision of the fall of a con­tem­po­rary Roman Empire, Loro’s bom­bast becomes numb­ing far too early.