Paolo Sorrentino
L'uomo in più

You don’t come out of the Eighties alive, seems the perfect summary for the first work of Paolo Sorrentino, year 2001.

Today this unexplored, imperfect, and bitter film comes to mind because bitter is the subject it portrays: the shadows behind the glimmer of our dual popular consciousness, football, and music. And it's a coincidence that today, August 15th, is the birth date of the two film characters. Here they are.
Antonio Pisapia, aka Tony, born in Naples, would be 74 years old, occupation: pop singer, balladeer.
Antonio Pisapia, born in Narni Scalo, would be 59, occupation: Serie A footballer, classy stopper.
Same date, same name, parallel destiny: in 1980 they are successful, rich, and famous. Rolling in money. Four years later they are sidelined, struggling not to end up in the mud, alone, forgotten.

Two stories of talents crushed by the yuppie infernal machine of business and opportunities, talents labeled by stereotypes: the footballer who had his day until he got injured, the sleazy and cocaine-addicted singer who ended his rise, perhaps destined to be archived in the trash, among minor artists, alongside the splendid Califano and Fred Buongusto, whom the film seems to be inspired by. On this note, there is a scene that alone is worth a medal of valor: Tony singing the song "La notte", with the poignant despair of a singer showcasing his hoarse and romantic voice to the crude audience of a village square, reminiscent of certain concerts we saw as children.

But let's return to the characters: they are mirror images, one is the reverse image of the other.
In the years when vulgarity is legitimized as normal, when voracity triumphs over ethics, Tony, the singer, is the product of that time and culture, he rides it and embodies its taste to the point of self-destructive paroxysm. His failure in the system is a failure of the system. In the heart of despicability, a proto-De Filippi-like TV program full of truths and tears, Tony presents himself as a tumor of that world, a heap of sick cells, deranged, with nothing left to lose, capable of undermining everything. Words erupt from his mouth, freed from the small necessities of live broadcasting and TV timing, shaking up what he is and what surrounds him. This earthquake is Tony, a masterful Servillo that here inaugurates his faithful partnership with Sorrentino.
And then, there's the extra man, antithetical to the first. Antonio, the footballer, played by Andrea Renzi, in a brilliant performance, has the predestined fate of someone who can't make it: too serious, too shy, too idealistic, too pure, constantly searching for something worth living for, driven by passion: his passion, his talent, the ball. The bitter epilogue, suicide, seems to tell us that this is a world that forgives everything but not honesty, moral rigor, spiritual value.

Looking back at Sorrentino's filmography, Antonio Pisapia, the footballer, is the only extra man, crystalline, in a roster of unappealing, opaque, morally borderline, even repugnant characters: a cynical, inhuman and aesthetically revolting multi-time prime minister, a hunchbacked and filthy loan shark who enjoys sexual favors, a cold mafia employee, a heroin addict at regular intervals, and our Tony, a sleazy balladeer. In this extraordinary descent into the sordid, where "Il Divo" is the grotesque bottom, "L'uomo in più" already indicates the iron law of Sorrentino's cinema: if you want to escape the filth, you must literally face the consequences of love. In all the films, attempts to redeem and escape the dense web of darkness have a price, each their own, depending on how far away one distances themselves from Evil, from the death of the purest footballer to the migraine of the Divo.
Prices to pay, as to stay or become clean is always to lose, but necessary as the quote from a poem by Amiri Baraka, known as Leroy Jones, "In Memory of Radio", that opens the first film and the entire series reminds us: It is better to have loved and lost than to put linoleum in your living rooms.

It is better to have loved and lost than to put linoleum in your living rooms.