Silvio Berlusconi, a leading figure on the Italian right, died on 12 June. His career was marked by a series of public and private scandals and by the school of thought that it gave rise to, “Berlusconism”. Many an Italian film has attempted to capture it since the 1990s.
One director in particular has distinguished himself in exploring the stigma left by Berlusconi on Italian society: Paolo Sorrentino. His 2018 film Loro (“Them”) is perhaps his most direct rendition of the sulphurous figure of the Cavaliere. However, the major themes associated with the right-wing leader are already broadly sketched out in La Grande Bellezza (Oscar for best foreign language film in 2014), which follows the existential upheaval of protagonist Jep Gambardella, a worldly and disillusioned sexagenarian who eventually regains his lust for life by delving into his past.
Entertainment as “categorical imperative”
Of the four salient features of Berlusconism shown in La Grande Bellezza, the most striking is that of the pursuit of individual pleasure. In an interview, Sorrentino said that Berlusconi raised entertainment during his tenure to the level of “categorical imperative”.
Take the sweeping, Fellinian scene of the night club in the first part of the film, for example. It is a perfect allegory of the Berlusconian pleasure principle, calling to mind various sex scandals that took place in the years prior to the film’s shooting. One thinks of the Cavaliere’s relationship with a then-18-year-old aspiring model, Noemi Letizia in 2008; the escort Patrizia D’Addario in 2009, or the underage Moroccan prostitute, Karima El Mahroug in 2010, an affair which went on to become known as the Ruby sex case. The scene’s excesses are but a hyperbolic copy of the hedonistic parties held at Berlusconi’s villas, pictured in great detail by the Italian press at the time.
The film’s characters embody respective facets of Berlusconism, namely, the desired and the desiring. On the one hand, we have Jep Gambardella, the party host and target of its dancers’ lustful glances; on the other, his friend Lello Cava, a businessman with a towering sex drive, seen shaking with excitement at the feet of a young woman dancing on a cube. Like many young women gravitating around Berlusconi, she’s there to make it as a showgirl.
Television and the cult of the self
The second feature of Berlusconi’s life is television, a medium inextricably linked to his financial success and political rise. The party is held under the aegis of “Lorena”, an opulent woman who emerges from Jep’s enormous birthday cake, played by none other than Serena Grandi. One of Italy’s sex symbols from the 1980s and 1990s, she appeared on several TV entertainment shows in the 1980s and 2000s. Her character is somewhat of a caricature of her public persona, merging two themes – sex and television – dear to Berlusconi.
The third grand Berlusconian theme is narcissism. In the first half of the film, we find it personified by Orietta, a woman who spends her time photographing herself and sending selfies to her admirers. This obsession with beauty and youth is also captured by the extraordinary scene in which a Botox guru administrates expensive injections to patients who revere him as their spiritual leader. It’s no secret that Berlusconi relished cosmetic surgery. The Cavaliere not only resorted to it extensively on himself, but also touted its merits to others, claiming women who had subjected themselves to the needle were “more beautiful”.
Corruption at every level
The last major feature of Berlusconi’s life to stand out in the film is corruption. From falsifying business accounts to bribing lawyers, the former Prime Minister has been charged with almost every offence under the sun. His right-hand man, Marcello Dell’Utri, has also been indicted for complicity with the Mafia.
This aspect of Berlusconi’s persona, which still contains grey areas, is reflected in the character of Giulio Moneta, an enigmatic businessman and neighbour of the protagonist, who appears from his high balcony but in reality, serves the interests of the underworld. Arrested by the police at the end of the film, he says, handcuffed, that he is one of those “moving the country forward” – a defence strategy typical of Berlusconi and his defence lawyers.
Historical perspective
The strength of Berlusconi’s depiction also lies in its historical perspective. Tapping into a range of images, Sorrentino helps viewers understand that Berlusconi’s triumph was made possible by the decline of the two major ideologies that shaped Italy’s 20th-century history: socialism (and its derivative, Marxism), and Catholicism.
The decline of Marxism is depicted in a scene that is at once solemn and grotesque, in which a famous body artist, her pubic area dyed red to reveal the sickle and hammer crest, comes crashing headlong into a Roman aqueduct. Through this spectacular, bloody performance, she represents the dead end to which the Soviet interpretation of Marxist thought has led.
At the same time, the protagonist is confronted with religion on a daily basis in the city of Rome, from the myriad of religious figures he sees in the streets or from his balcony, to the monuments dotted around the Eternal City. Yet Jep Gambardella’s view of religion, imbued with nostalgia and strangeness, is typical of a secularised society in which religion no longer plays the primary role of organising authority.
The idea that Berlusconi could flourish in an ideological vacuum created by the decline of these two great ideologies is expressed in the transition from the first to the second sequence of the film. La Grande Bellezza opens with a stroll on Mount Janiculum, offering a series of images that alternatively evoke socialism – i.e., the statue of Garibaldi on horseback, or the busts of Garibaldi supporters on display in a public garden – and Christianity. We are taken to the fountain “Acqua Paola”, commissioned by Pope Paul V in 1608, while the film’s first shot shows the cannon shot at midday from Janiculum Hill in Rome, a practice initiated by Pope Pius IX in 1948 to allow the Roman bells to ring in unison.
The transition to the second sequence, that of the nightclub, is a guest’s hysterical scream filmed in close-up. It acts as a cry of distress to express the transition from strong but bygone ideologies to the ideology of seemingly carefree, narcissistic enjoyment.
La Grande Bellezza, which began filming in August 2012, is imbued with a pungent whiff of decadence that harks back to the end of Berlusconi’s political reign. Beset by sex scandals and Italy’s dramatic finances – “on the brink of a precipice” is how the business newspaper Il Sole 24 ore put it a few days earlier – the Cavaliere stepped down as prime minister on 12 November 2011. In the last part of the film, the protagonist can indeed be seen staring in silence at the capsized hull of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that sank on 12 January 2012.