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Rating: If you were born in the 80s and lived in Brianza long enough, you are lucky to have escaped Berlusconi. I, at least, consider myself lucky. Silvio Berlusconi is more famous than Jesus. No, John, calm down, I'll listen to "Jealous Guy" later and we can make peace, come on.
I was a child and watched from my grandparents' balcony the dirt ground of the courtyard, the TV antennas stretched out to capture invisible signals, the jets tearing through the sky with their white smoke trails we kids thought were angels' paths; and whenever a helicopter passed by, it was always Berlusconi's. "Look, Berlusconi is coming home," they would say if one passed in the evening, "Look, Berlusconi is going to work," if one passed in the morning.
My grandfather had to spend two months in the hospital due to heart problems. I would see my grandmother leaving every afternoon in her gray coat with a worried expression, "Are you going to visit grandpa?" I asked, "Yes, to Milano Due". Berlusconi's Milan. I was a little Inter fan out of admiration for a wonderful father, me crouched in the seat of his brown station-wagon Mercedes that resembled a funeral car, listening to the radio waves talk about Lothar Matthäus and his free kicks, his class, his footballing embodiment of perfection, this year dad, Inter wins the championship, I see cars with big black-and-blue flags passing, the horns, I've never heard so many horns in my life. Yes, he tells me, we'll win the championship. But the Champions Cup, that's won by Milan, Berlusconi's Milan.
And there's Bim Bum Bam, Uan popping out like a psychedelic pink mushroom from the monitor before D'Artagnan, Four on the other network, the one kids liked less, puppets and colors. Past ten years, you discovered that the networks airing some of your favorite cartoons were all owned by Berlusconi (the period before five years was for understanding that the characters on TV were not physically inside the TV set but were images traveling through the ether, while the period between five and ten was for understanding what the hell "ether" meant). "Look, that's Berlusconi's villa," they told me passing by the narrow road leading to Canonica, Macherio.
The villa in Macherio is better seen from the road, the one in Arcore is more hidden, you can only see the hedges and the façade for a few meters if you're careful while turning to go towards the town center. As a child in school, I drew a picture of myself in a tuxedo buying that villa, which had many windows. And when they wanted to motivate you to study, they'd say, "Look, at the beginning Berlusconi had nothing." In short, it was hard to escape from Berlusconi, but many managed to do so.
This documentary by Roberto Faenza and Filippo Macelloni traces the saga of a character who, willingly or not, made recent history in Italy, and it does so in a way that would seem almost neutral if not for the ironic opening entrusted to the voice of his mother Rosa Bossi, where she claims that "you will never see Silvio with any woman", and especially for the ending with newspaper clippings where unfulfilled promises pour down. It faithfully recounts a well-known story, that of a miracle man, an infallible entrepreneur and, as Montanelli called him, "the greatest salesman in the world", a tireless worker with funds of dubious origin, almost idolizing this first aspect of his life.
Then, the darkness: the entry into politics, which served him on one hand to shield himself behind ad personam laws, and exposed him on the other to the public in all his low morals and smug smile. Before '94 Berlusconi was a much more complex character than the current one, now he is just a grotesque figure on the road to decline of whom everyone knows everything or thinks they do, a short, plasticized Scarface locked in his waning empire waging an impossible war against anyone trying to climb his balconies.
Before, he was more mysterious than public, TV services aired when he was caught taking a walk. Over an hour of footage fished from RAI archives, almost always edited chronologically and in descending order, from the entrepreneurial glories of Champagne and gala evenings to the depths of current dignity, phone calls with D'Addario, nights with Ruby, the divorce, unpleasant jokes, laws to safeguard himself. Nothing new, for someone like me who expected something minimally revealing, half of the footage was already easily available on the Internet.
The image of a fallen knight still emerges who no longer has anything of that ideal of a man they tried to put in your head when you were a child, his villa has lost its charm and is no longer visible among the trees, Bim Bum Bam hasn't aired in ages and I no longer look up at the helicopters that pass by. But it’s impressive to still see people who don't notice that Berlusconi buys Ibrahimovic for Milan only when the risk of early elections looms. And, damn, he's lucky enough to win the championship. Only a plastic smile remains, promises, overturned negative balances, censorship, a phobia of communists, and above all the delusions of omnipotence. Nothing new, save your money and take a stroll on YouTube, but Wikipedia is enough too. Where the original audio was not available, Neri Marcorè's voice is present.
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