LA "VIDEOCRACY" DE BERLUSCONI

Videocracy
Videocracy
ATMO/Lorber Films


February 12, 2010
Prime Minister, Primo Mogul

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By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: February 12, 2010

There are moments in “Videocracy,” a queasy-funny and unapologetically biased look at the televisual world that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has created, when it feels as if you were watching a transmission from another planet. A media mogul who has a monopoly hold on Italian television and was elected for a third term in 2008, Mr. Berlusconi helped put the boob (and lots of them) on the Italian tube and is often in the news himself for his political machinations, outrageous observations — Mussolini sent people away on “holiday”; President Obama is “suntanned” — sexcapades and persistent charges of corruption.

It doesn’t let up. In December, following a political rally, a stranger fractured Mr. Berlusconi’s nose and broke some of his teeth with a statuette of a cathedral. The attacker apparently had a history of mental problems. Mr. Berlusconi, now 73, has had a speedy recovery, and the judge investigating the assault has demanded to see a report of the politician’s injuries. On Wednesday The Financial Times reported that one of his closest advisers, Guido Bertolaso, who runs a government agency that deals with natural disasters and state events, was being investigated on corruption charges relating to building contracts for the 2009 G-8 conference in Italy. The investigation has led to the arrest of four people. And so it goes.

“Videocracy,” which has been on the festival circuit since its premiere at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, doesn’t cover these latest scandals and stories, of course. (That would require a news feed.) Rather, the director Erik Gandini, who was born in Italy and studied film in Sweden (the movie was partly produced with Swedish television money), takes a longer, more generalized view. Though Mr. Berlusconi himself — the man, oligarch, tabloid personality and plastic surgery victim — has undeniable entertainment value, Mr. Gandini is more interested in what might be termed the Berlusconi effect. What he’s after is Mr. Berlusconi’s impact on Italian culture, specifically those for whom celebrity is power. Which is why, by accident or design, “Videocracy” ends up holding a mirror to the larger world.

Using well-integrated archival material and assorted newer interviews, Mr. Gandini — who also serves as the narrator — opens his story with a wacky blast from Italy’s cathode-ray past: a television call-in quiz show that featured masked women stripping whenever a contestant has a correct answer. According to Mr. Gandini, the show was a succès de scandale because factory workers were staying up late to watch it. (Though unmentioned, the show emerged around the same time that Italy was being rocked by assaults by the Red Brigades, a homegrown militant group that in 1978 kidnapped and assassinated a former prime minister, Aldo Moro.) From this humble start Mr. Berlusconi found a television template for success: the fewer clothes women wore, the more power he accrued.

Women are all over Italian television, smiling and still stripping, their ample cups running over. Some of these television ornaments are called veline (showgirls), and their existence says a lot about the uses of the female body in contemporary Italian culture and Mr. Berlusconi’s role in such exploitation. In “Videocracy” there’s a scene in which an assortment of women, many wearing towering heels and strained smiles, audition as veline on a small stage in what appears to be a mall, surrounded by a clapping, seemingly approving audience of shoppers. Last November, Time reported that a poll of girls in Milan said that being a velina was their top choice of profession. And no wonder: Mara Carfagna, Mr. Berlusconi’s minister for equal opportunities, is a former velina.

Mr. Berlusconi’s relationship to women, individually and collectively, is a fascinating element in his rise to power and easily could have consumed all of “Videocracy.” You get a sense of that relationship during a stunning campaign commercial that Mr. Gandini includes — as a researcher, he digs through the dirt like a truffle pig — in which different women sing the praises of the prime minister from the supermarket to the swimming pool. (“Thank God Silvio exists!”) It might have been useful if Mr. Gandini had talked to some women less enamored with the prime minister, but because he isn’t pretending to be objective or a journalist, he doesn’t really present both sides of the argument. He obviously doesn’t believe two exist.

Structurally the movie gets off to a shaky start with an overlong interlude featuring a young laborer, Ricky Canevali, who dreams of finding television fame through a combination of martial arts and singing. However representative of the average star-struck Italian, he is too modest a figure on which to hang the aspirations of a nation. Far more persuasive (and mesmerizing and repellent) is the extensive face time that Mr. Gandini scored with figures who loom large in the pop cultural scene: Lele Mora, a talent agent and F.O.B. (Friend of Berlusconi) who is also a self-professed Mussolini admirer, and Fabrizio Corona, the so-called king of the paparazzi who was recently imprisoned for trying to extort money from some of his celebrated subjects.

In his 2004 book “Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony,” Paul Ginsborg, a history professor at the University of Florence, quotes a Berlusconi associate who explained: “Television was profoundly congenial to Berlusconi’s character. It inspired him because of the speed with which he could put into practice the ideas that went through his head. I’d go further: television is Berlusconi.” Mr. Ginsborg continues, “This symbiotic relationship with the medium of television is fundamental to our understanding of the man.” Given the stakes, it’s hard not to wish that Mr. Gandini had been more ambitious: at 85 minutes, “Videocracy” can only scratch the surface. Even so, after watching it, you realize that even a cursory look at Mr. Berlusconi is crucial to understanding an age in which celebrity is now the coin of the realm.

VIDEOCRACY

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by Erik Gandini; directors of photography, Manuel Alberto Claro and Lukas Eisenhauer; edited by Johan Soderberg; music by Mr. Soderberg and David Osterberg; released by Lorber Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In English and Italian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. This film is not rated.




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