Marco Bellocchio, the tireless warhorse of Italian cinema, kicks up a swirling dust cloud of corruption with this fabulous, stranger-than-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Shot for the streaming service HBO Max, it is the director’s second historical miniseries after 2022’s Exterior Night, about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and features the same lead player in Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has surely cornered the market in playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas typically inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The ground is liable to drop away pretty much at any moment.
Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, a primetime TV presenter in the twinkling Terry Wogan mould who hosts a Friday night entertainment show on a soundstage made up to resemble an old-style small-town market. Portobello features dances and phone-ins and stars a parrot called Ramon, who point-blank refuses to speak. The show pulls in a peak audience of about 28 million, which means it’s watched by everyone, in all social classes, from the sisters at the convent to the cons inside Naples’ Poggioreale prison. One of these prisoners is such a fan of Portobello, in fact, that he posts Tortora a set of knitted lace doilies to be auctioned at his market. Naturally the inmate wants a namecheck on the show – or failing that, a letter of thanks. So he writes to Tortora again, and this time he’s more peeved.
Bellocchio turns 86 in November and has spent the bulk of his career exploring the darker, smoke-filled rooms of Italian history, whether it was tackling 70s Red Brigade terrorism (Good Morning, Night), 80s mafia culture (The Traitor) or a 19th-century papal conspiracy (2023’s Kidnapped). But every good period drama is at least tangentially about the present, and so it is with Portobello, which anticipates the rise of first Berlusconi and then Trump, with its corrosive cocktail of celebrity, politics and organised crime. The first two episodes (of a total of six) premiered at the Venice film festival, and neatly crosscut Tortora’s bright, primetime rise with the pathetic, scrambling slide of Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella), a servile mob secretary who is so in fear of his life that he will essentially tell the DA’s office whatever it wants to hear. Tortora, Pandico says, is a Camorra insider, while “lace doily” is code for a shipment of cocaine. And the parrot, Ramon? Well, he was in on it, too.
“This is the theatre of the absurd,” protests Tortora when he’s hauled in for questioning, and one can sympathise with his plight. He has been poleaxed by a chain of events that appear to have begun with a humble set of doilies and may end with a 10-year stretch inside. A different breed of director might have mined the material for laughs and cast Tortora in the role of a hysterical clown. Bellocchio, though, elects to play the story entirely straight – as a hard-faced procedural in which Pandico’s desperate throwaway lie takes on a remorseless momentum. So Bellocchio’s Portobello is finally nothing like its namesake at all. It’s potent and serious, mordantly funny and bitingly cynical. Dragged on to the street in handcuffs, Tortora looks up and sees he’s being filmed by the cameramen from his own TV station. The man is still a primetime star of sorts, but he’s now made the jump from light entertainment to the nightly news.