Il Divo's not much of a movie -- a good lazy afternoon watch if you catch it on TV, though it'll probably never play on TV in this country. Politics, as Guy Ritchie would describe them to you. It's worth it, though, for Toni Servillo, who plays Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Max Schreck's Nosferatu and one of Richard Barthelmess' Chinamen. Hunchbacked and heartbroken, but also eternally calm like one of Barthelmess' cyphers, who were too Expressionist to be ethnic caricatures -- to be accused of that, they'd have to seem like human beings first. Servillo neither humanizes nor villifies Andreotti -- instead, he finds, within the likeness of a public figure, a strange creature, someone who casually walked in from some netherworld into ours and simply hasn't found the time to leave.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Playing Nosferatu
Il Divo's not much of a movie -- a good lazy afternoon watch if you catch it on TV, though it'll probably never play on TV in this country. Politics, as Guy Ritchie would describe them to you. It's worth it, though, for Toni Servillo, who plays Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Max Schreck's Nosferatu and one of Richard Barthelmess' Chinamen. Hunchbacked and heartbroken, but also eternally calm like one of Barthelmess' cyphers, who were too Expressionist to be ethnic caricatures -- to be accused of that, they'd have to seem like human beings first. Servillo neither humanizes nor villifies Andreotti -- instead, he finds, within the likeness of a public figure, a strange creature, someone who casually walked in from some netherworld into ours and simply hasn't found the time to leave.
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