M Arco Bellocchio, the tireless warrior of Italian cinema, raises a swirling cloud of corruption dust with this fabulous, alien-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Filmed for the streaming service HBO Max, it’s the director’s second historical miniseries, following 2022’s Outside Night about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and stars the same main character, Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has certainly cornered the market playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas tend to inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The earth can pretty much give up at any given moment.
Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, the primary TV host in Thinkling Terry Wogan Mold, who hosts a Friday night entertainment show in a sound station designed to resemble an old-style small-town market. Portobello has dancing and a telephone, and stars a parrot named Ramon who, point-blank, refuses to talk. The show draws a peak audience of around 28 million people, meaning it’s watched by everyone from nuns in a convent to Cons to Cons in Naples’ Poggioreale prison. One of these inmates is such a fan of Portobello that he’s putting up a set of knitted lace doilies for Tortora to be auctioned off at his market. Naturally, the inmate wants a namecheck on the show, or, failing that, a thank-you note. So he writes to Tortora again, and this time he’s more subdued.
Bellocchio turns 86 in November and has spent much of his career exploring the darkest, smoke-filled rooms of Italian history, whether it’s tackling the Red Brigades’ terrorism of the 1970s (Good Morning, Night), the mafia culture of the 1980s (Traitor) or the papal consulship of the 19th century (Child of 2023). But every good period drama has at least a tangential connection to the present, and so it’s with Portobello that the rise of first Berlusconi and then Trump, with its caustic cocktail of celebrity, politics and organised crime, is prefigured. The first two episodes (of a total of six) premiered at the Venice Film Festival and neatly intersect with Tortora’s light-hearted, prim rise to prominence with the pathetic, moto-crossed Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella), a serving mob secretary so afraid for his life that he’ll basically tell Da’s office whatever it wants to hear. Tortora, according to Pandico, is a Camorra insider, while “lace boily” is code for a cocaine shipment. And the parrot, Ramon? Well, he was in on it too.
“This is the theater of the absurd,” Tortora protests as he is dragged in for questioning, and one can sympathize with his plight. He has been set up by a chain of events that seems to have begun with a humble set of doilies and could end with a 10-year stretch inside. A different breed of director might have sourced the material for the laughs and cast Tortora as the hysterical clown. Yet Bellocchio chooses to play the story perfectly straight—as a heartbreaking procedural in which Pandico’s desperate throws are pitiful. So Bellocchio’s Portobello is ultimately nothing like its namesake. It is powerful and serious, very funny and painfully cynical. Dragging him out into the street in handcuffs, Tortora looks up to see himself being filmed by cameras from his TV station. The man is still a major star of sorts, but he has now moved from light entertainment to the nightly news.
