Loro: a portrayal of political corruption and debauchery seduced by its own excess

Paolo Sorrentino, “Loro / Them” (2018)

Originally made in two parts totalling three hours, this fictional drama about Italian media magnate and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and his circle of business pals, sycophants and hangers-on, was condensed into a 145-minute flick for foreign audiences, which would explain the strange narrative jumps and the shaky narrative itself which initially focuses on young businessman Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio) eager to ingratiate himself with Berlusconi (Toni Servillo) to gain favours for his clients and ultimately a nice comfortable job with much money and power and little responsibility for himself, and then switches over to Berlusconi and follows him all the way to the end, discarding the young follower and his friends with no explanation as to whether they all achieved what they wanted. A bewildering parade of people, fictional and real, and many of them lasting only a few minutes, pass through Morra and Berlusconi’s lives on screen.

While Servillo is excellent in the role, with his clown-like face masking over a character entirely lacking in integrity and ethics, concerned only with gaining more power and wealth (and to hell with the consequences for Italian politics and democracy, and Italy itself), and is the centre-piece around whom the film revolves, viewers unfortunately will learn very little about how Berlusconi came to be a wealthy media tycoon and how his wealth and connections helped to vault him into the nation’s leadership. What viewers will see is the brash and tawdry life-style Berlusconi led during his reign as top-dog and the people that life-style attracts: the parade of young escort women who will do anything and everything (and more besides) to get close to heady power; the gangster-like bodyguards and minders who surround him; young pimps like Morra who regard Berlusconi as a role model; and the various politicians Berlusconi buys. Berlusconi’s mansions are luxurious if not particularly tasteful and the parties he and Morra throw initially look like a lot of fun but become repetitive and banal. It’s as if, in attempting to detail how debauched and empty Berlusconi’s world is, the film itself ended up being seduced by the debauchery and its gaudy superficiality.

While the film’s focus was on Morra and Berlusconi, at least there was some tension and direction (will Morra get what he desires? will Berlusconi deliver?) but once Morra is literally out of the picture and the focus turns to Berlusconi to the exclusion of everyone else, the film limps through a series of sketches. Only the earthquake in L’Aquila, leaving working-class survivors homeless and destitute, provides the moral backbone that tests Berlusconi’s character and that of Italy itself. While Berlusconi manages to cough up money to rehouse the homeless, the real job of salvaging Italian society and its soul falls to the ordinary people as represented by the firefighters who retrieve a statue of Jesus from the rubble of a destroyed church.

The film does a very good job of portraying the empty and corrupt world of those who have more money than they have the mental faculty to deal with it all but says nothing about how Berlusconi bought and cheated his way into it and corrupted Italian politics and state institutions in the process – nor about the people and organisations, legal and illegal, that helped him along the way.

Perhaps the funniest part of the film is the sketch where Berlusconi, believing himself to have lost his persuasive abilities, thumbs through a phone book and phones an unnamed woman and tries to sell her an expensive piece of real estate: the disgruntled recipient doesn’t fall for the sales pitch. After this sketch, we don’t see this woman any more. Apart from this and other occasional gems, the film’s moral heart looks as shaky and shallow as the world Berlusconi created around himself.