Belluscone: A Sicilian Story

A riotous anti-epic by gonzo satirist Franco Maresco about Silvio Berlusconi’s Mafia connections and the way in which his politics of spiritual debasement via tabloid TV have transformed Italy for the worse. Or rather, a film about the impossibility of making such a film… Done as a hybrid sort-of documentary about its own unmaking, it features real-life film critic Tatti Sanguineti arriving in Palermo to find out what became of Maresco’s abandoned project—the film we are actually watching!—and Maresco himself talking about his own film in the third person. What emerges is a Punch and Judy show that settles on some of Sicily’s weirdest show-business characters, led by a weaselly talent agent with sketchy connections and his two cheesy crooners, who perform “neomelodic” songs (a musical subgenre with close organized crime ties). Hard to believe they’re real—and in Maresco’s barrage of footage you can never be sure what’s real and what’s invented. The “Belluscone” of the title, by the way, is how someone with a thick Sicilian accent would pronounce Berlusconi…