By Harvey Karten - Early this year, the United State Supreme Court-which has become more of a political body than a neutral, judicial one-ruled that corporations can spend all the money they desire to promote their candidates during our usual protracted campaigns. The black-robed body overturned a bevy of precedents that limited their contributions, which had been a wise policy to prevent Big Money from swamping independent voices and presumably third-party candidates. In Italy, the system takes this reasoning a couple of steps further. The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, doesn't have to spend money to get his face on TV and in the print media. He owns most of them! Yes, at least seventy percent of TV stations and something like ninety percent of the magazines are actually controlled by the prime minister, who spent the last thirty years building up an empire that even Rupert Murdoch could envy. In a left-leaning documentary by Erik Gandini, who spent twenty of his years in Sweden where he noted with pleasure the absence of massive advertising on Scandinavian TV, the filmmaker holds that eighty percent of the Italian people get all their information from the ubiquitous tube. Since one does not expect Mr. Berlusconi to sing kumbaya with his opponents and donate time to them on his own TV channels, which are the prime medium for political campaigning, we can expect the guy to remain to in power for as long as he wants.
VIDEOCRACY
Lorber Films
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: B-
Directed by: Erik Gandini
Written By: Erik Gandini
Cast: Silvio Berlusconi, Flavio Briatore, Rick Canelli, Fabrizio Corona, Marella Giovannelli, Lele Mora, Simona Ventura
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 2/2/10
Opens: February 12, 2010
Ah, but that's not all. If any journalists feel like criticizing the current administration in Italy, they are possibly free to do so if they can find a paper or media outlet with any viewers, but then they're left out of the party. No, not just the political party, but the party party. I don't know whether Berlusconi hands out bread to the populace like the Roman emperors, but he does arrange circuses aplenty with slim, young, sexy women to entertaining the men. One of the PM's principal locations for these blasts is Berlusconi's best friend and talent agent's lush digs overlooking the water on the island of Sardinia, a man who proudly professes his love for Mussolini and even has an animated show on his cell phone featuring the swastika.
Aside from the politicians on display, Gandini focuses on three people to further demonstrate why, according to a prestigious organization's annual survey Italy is only number 77th in freedom and 84th in gender equity. They are a 26-year-old factory worker who dreams of becoming famous the only way one can become a celebrity, and that's by appearing on TV; Lele Mora, an effeminate talent agent dressed in white with a white-walled villa in Sardinia, in charge of putting the right, sexy people on television; and Fabrizio Corona, a rich, tattooed paparazzo who takes pictures of celebs for the tabloids and in at least one instance to capture the PM's daughter Barbara in an unflattering photo, receiving compensation from the PM's office for turning it over.
One of these people stands out. The factory worker shows off his black-belt martial arts skills, parading about on his mother's lawn, his spare time away from the lathe taken up in auditions for TV. Getting his initial education from Bruce Lee, the worker claims to combine the singing talent of Rick Martin with the martial arts talent of Jean-Claude Van Damme, but how can he break into TV when Berlusconi peoples the tube with hordes of bimbos known as velini who gyrate like third-rate clones of Beyoncé and would presumably do anything to keep their bods in front of the Italian populace?
Ultimately, one has to wonder whether Gandini, whose documentary is casually structured and repetitious, makes his point. While Americans (other than Bush 43) believe that combinations in restraint of trade are bad, Italians blithely put up with a fellow who has built a media empire. But is there really a one-to-one or even one-to-five correlation between this particular power and his ascension and retention of the top job in his country? I can imagine a politically conservative viewer wondering whether Gandini is some sort of commie who puts forth what the viewer may consider an absurd attempt to connect dots that are far apart as Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad. While people in many parts of the world, Americans not excluded, may spend all their spare time dreaming of appearing on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "Extreme Makeover," there is little if any correlation between that near-universal wish and political control by the guys who grant it. In fact the reverse is true. While Berlusconi got away with his alleged affair with 18-year-old model Noemi Letizia, others have fared poorly with publicity we've given to politicians like Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, John Edwards, and hey, Thomas Jefferson.
VIDEOCRACY (Lorber Films)
Unrated. 85 minutes. © 2010 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
