Loro: Biting Berlusconi satire flashes the flesh

FORGET the sex, drugs and debauchery … what one remembers most about this ferocious political satire, after the credits have rolled, is Toni Servillo’s artfully enigmatic performance in the role of Silvio Berlusconi.

LORO

Three and a half stars

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Starring: Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Riccardo Scamarcio

Rating: MA (15+)

Running time: 150 minutes

Verdict: A grotesquely funny satire of contemporary Italian politics

FORGET the sex, drugs and debauchery … what one remembers most about this ferocious political satire, after the credits have rolled, is Toni Servillo’s artfully enigmatic performance in the role of Silvio Berlusconi.

While the infamous Italian politician remains a strangely elusive character in this eye-popping 150 minute flesh-fest, the filmmakers use this to their advantage.

Like the hookers, handlers and hangers-on, we are drawn into his moral and ideological vacuum.

Toni Servillo stars as former Italian president Silvio Berlusconi in Loro.

Servillo plays the media tycoon and former Prime Minister with the affable, pragmatic charm of, well, a real estate salesman.

There’s a great scene in which, geed up by an old friend and business partner, a reluctantly sidelined Berlusconi decides to see whether he still has it, cold calling a lonely housewife to sell her a dream apartment that has yet to be built.

It’s a dry run for his next political move — buying six senators to reclaim power.

Boldly and controversially speculating on what might have gone on behind closed doors, Loro portrays Berlusconi as a surprisingly likeable old lech (would he really have been so gracious to a young woman who told him he smelled like her grandfather and rejected his advances as “pathetic”?)

But director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, The Young Pope) is scathing in his critique of the culture of greed, corruption and self-abasement that his subject represents.

In Italy, Loro, which translates as “Them”, but also represents a word play on l’oro, or gold, was released in two parts. Almost an hour has been cut for this 150-minute international version.

Sorrentino’s film focuses on the period from 2006 to 2009, after the fall of Berlusconi’s third government.

Cooling his heels at his holiday house in Sardinia, the ex-Prime Minister, already embroiled in various criminal trials, works hard to save his 26-year marriage to second wife Veronica Lario (Elena Sofia Ricci).

Which is why he initially ignores the none-to-subtle advances of Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) and his wife (Euridice Axen).

The couple have populated a neighbouring villa with a bunch of barely-clad beauties, whom they ply with a never-ending supply of cocaine and MDMA.

Morra is seeking a seat in the European Parliament. This is how he plans to gain the Great Man’s ear.

But when Berlusconi finally succumbs to temptation, following his wife’s departure, everyone winds up disappointed.

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