Portrait of political power gives festival its edge

A magnificently theatrical portrait of the self-appointed godfather of Italian politics, Giulio Andreotti, is a standout attraction at the 2009 Italian Film Festival which opens in Auckland next week.

The festival, now in its 14th year, is the biggest single-culture showcase in the film-going calendar and its quality has increased steadily in recent years.

Italian films have long been difficult to lure down this end of the world, though 2009 has seen some excellent releases (notably the two Mafia-themed dramas Gomorrah and The Sicilian Girl). But this festival programme has some return performances by familiar names and at least a couple of knockouts - among them the Andreotti film.

It is impossible to overstate the influence of Andreotti on Italian politics. The seven-time prime minister (he first took the top job in 1972) who was made a senator for life in 1991 has been in Parliament continuously for 63 years. In that time he has been connected with dozens of murders - not least that of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was assassinated by Red Brigade terrorists in the 1970s.

He was even convicted and sentenced to 24 years in prison in 2002 in connection with the killing of a journalist, but the conviction was overturned by a higher court.

As a result, he attracted a variety of nicknames over the years, including the Sphinx, the Hunchback, the Black Pope and Beelzebub. But Il Divo - or The Deity as it was once applied to Julius Caesar - is the one used to entitle the eye-poppingly kinetic portrait in this programme.

Building around a chillingly precise performance by Toni Servillo - the squashed ears, sour smirk, stiff walk and limp handshake might be dismissed as the clichéd gestures of a caricature if they weren't so exactly observed - director Paolo Sorrentino creates a wildly operatic and overblown fantasia which doesn't so much tell Andreotti's story as distil his essence into a series of cinematic tableaux.

Some sequences - the opening shot of the migraine-prone Andreotti's head bristling with acupuncture needles; a recurring motif of a pre-dawn city walk with a military escort armed to the teeth - are so bizarre as to verge on the surreal, but they come to seem quite natural in the context of this incredible life.

A terrific score which ranges from Fauré to Beth Orton adds to the sense of the film as a multimedia experience, neither documentary nor drama but somehow beyond both.

"I don't succumb to lesser vices," it has Andreotti say at one point, which leaves us wondering what vices a man who never seems to drink anything but antacid does succumb to.

Plainly the film is deeply learned - tertiary study in post-war Italian politics is necessary to understand its finer points - but it offers plenty to the uninitiated and the filmmaker, who was only 2 years old when Andreotti first took the nation's top job, doesn't pull his punches. If, in the end, the film lacks the neat narrative conclusion of the finest drama, that's apt: evil, it argues, will always flourish in the shadows despite the best attempts to shine light on it.

Servillo takes the main role in another excellent film in the programme, but you'd never know from the look of him. The actor, who played the crook running the toxic waste dump in Gomorrah, is the police chief in an elegant controlled procedural called The Girl By The Lake.

It's set far from the tourist-postcard Italy, in the far northeast among the cool mountains called the Dolomites. It's based on a Norwegian novel called Don't Look Back and indeed it's very novelistic in tone - the characters are complicated and their back-stories multi-layered. In this small-town thriller, our suspicions fall on practically everyone and it recalls Atom Egoyan (particularly The Sweet Hereafter) in the way it turns an apparently routine story into a meditation on the nature of being human.

These two, the only films previewed at press time, may suggest a festival full of grim and demanding movies. But there is no shortage of romantic comedies, a historical drama and a documentary for petrolheads about the history of Ferrari.

LOWDOWN

What: The Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival.
Where and when: Rialto Newmarket and Bridgeway Northcote from Wednesday; Napier and Tauranga in November.