Il Divo (2008)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Italy, early '90s. Calm, clever and inscrutable, politician Giulio Andreotti has been synonymous with power for decades. He has survived everything: electoral battles, terrorist massacres, loss of friends, slanderous accusations; but now certain repentant mobsters implicate him in the crimes of Cosa Nostra.
2 connections found
View:
2 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Il Divo to
Paolo Sorrentino’s international breakthrough, Il Divo, played like a wan Scorsese homage, its stylistic excess a means of capturing the mindset of its protagonist (an Italian prime minister more gangster than politician) while also playing up its perversity.
As with “ Il Divo ” and “ This Must Be the Place ,” Sorrentino continues to tackle major topics using an extraordinary combination of broad brushstrokes and minute detail.
The film by Paolo Sorrentino (“Il Divo”) is a Fellini-esque carnival of wonders as observed by a jaded 65-year-old writer (Toni Servillo) re-reading his own life with wry regret.
Celebrating Rome in all its decay, this florid comedy by Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be the Place) opens with a hyperbolically gaudy party honoring a celebrity journalist (Toni Servillo) on his 65th birthday.
Sì, sì and sì: in Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagant, confident, magnificent epic, “The Great Beauty” (La grande bellezza), Rome is front and center in all its decaying beauty and insurgent energy, its “disenchantment and cynicism,” with Sorrentino’s protagonist, the journalist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo, “Gomorrah,” “Il divo”), lending his sad eyes to reflect all of society in front of him.
Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino scored spectacularly with the frenetic political biopic Il Divo , which starred his frequent collaborator Toni Servillo.
From a corrupt Italian prime minister haunting the dark shadows of his palace in Il Divo, to an adrift mob bag-man living in a hotel in The Consequences of Love, to an aging author lost in a limbo of endless parties in The Great Beauty , Sorrentino’s men find themselves trapped in the spaces of his films like alienated, ruminative little specters.
After winning the Foreign Language Film Oscar last year for "The Great Beauty," writer/director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo") follows up with a heavy handed movie with one too many messages, excusing himself with one in which artists are condemned for their 'moments of levity.'
Ojalá, pero teniendo en cuenta que ya lo hizo, no sobre él mismo sino sobre su Italia contemporánea en Il divo, pues tampoco me preocupa demasiado.
Sorrentino's previous Italian films, "Il Divo" and "The Great Beauty" played more like grand operas.
Fellini’s influence, especially that of “8½,” remains, and while the whole package isn’t as demonstrably bravura as “Il Divo” or “The Great Beauty,” it’s more in touch with human experience.
That’s why his only feature based on a real-life story, Il Divo (winner of the 2008 Jury Prize), is also his best to date.