Loro [Edizione: Regno Unito]

Descrizione

Sergio is a guileful businessman who manages a group of young escorts which he uses to bribe local politicians and authority figures. With a desire for increased political leverage, he sets his eyes on bigger game and makes it his duty to work his way into the ranks of a man with a notorious taste for both hedonism and corruption - Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Master filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (Youth, The Great Beauty) teams up once again with longtime collaborator Toni Servillo (Il Divo, The Great Beauty) to reveal the scandalous and, until now, unseen private life of Italy s most infamous politician.

Recensione

Loro is a strange and intriguing film, scripted by Sorrentino with his longtime writing partner Umberto Contarello: sometimes whimsical, sometimes gruellingly sordid, sometimes wayward in those Fellini-esque departures and dreamlike epiphanies of which Sorrentino has made himself such a master. Does it offer a vision of the spiritual heart of Berlusconian darkness? Or something more ambiguous and lenient, a glumly comic vision of an opera buffa figure who has receded into history, long since replaced by Trump and Weinstein as key players of nastiness and misogyny? For all the tackiness and misery, it actually flatters Berlusconi. Servillo is such a smart and sympathetic actor that he surrounds Silvio with an aura that he doesn t deserve. And his Berlusconi is shown behaving relatively well: though always a bully and a creep with women, he is depicted as still pathetically in love with his wife, Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci), who has come to despise him. In one surreally composed mirror-image scene, business associate Ennio Doris (also played by Servillo) persuades him to reimburse out-of-pocket investors because it is good publicity and altruism is the best way to be selfish . - Peter Bradshaw (3 Stars) --https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/17/loro-review-paolo-sorrentino

Servillo is both grotesque and captivating, perhaps lending the real-life monster a little too much charm there s a great moment where he is sexually rebuffed by a 20-year-old (Alice Pagani) because his breath reminds her of her grandfather s. It s a blip in the film s non-stop orgy of sex, drugs, bunga bunga games and bad pop music. If it s not Sorrentino on tip-top Great Beauty form there are slack stretches and, in stitching two films together, the film has a strange dramatic shape it nonetheless has images (an exploding garbage truck) and sequences that remain bold, stylish and intoxicating. - Ian Freer (4 Stars) --https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/loro-review/