Italy, early '90s. Calm, clever and inscrutable, politician Giulio Andreotti has been synonymous with power for decades. He has survived everything: electoral battles, terrorist massacres, loss of friends, slanderous accusations; but now certain repentant mobsters implicate him in the crimes of Cosa Nostra.
Sorrentino stages politics as cool, stylised theatre: gliding camera moves, pop music and a near motionless Toni Servillo give the film the tone of an opera about power. The pace is brisk, the dialogue is biting, and much is left deliberately unexplained, so you drift through a web of names and alliances. It demands attention, but rewards it with an idiosyncratic, almost ironic view of postwar Italian politics.
Good for you if you like political stories that are told with style and dark humour rather than dry realism.
Written with AI, based on TMDb data.