The Great Desperation
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, famously dismissed talk of crisis in Italy, noting that restaurants were full and seats on planes hard to find. He also suggested that one reason to invest in Italy “is that we have beautiful secretaries.” In short, he was an unserious man for serious times. Yet he is the longest-serving postwar Italian leader and headed the government for a couple of years after the euro came under grave threat.
This is a puzzle, and no less so now that Berlusconi has been convicted of tax fraud, banned from public office for two years, and handed a one-year sentence he wants to serve by doing community service, perhaps returning to his former life as a crooner.
Italians are not frivolous people; there are few more serious or industrious places than Turin and Milan. Was Berlusconi — a billionaire at a time when the super-rich stamp their gilded existences on the world’s agenda — emblematic of the zeitgeist well beyond Italy? He was a performer for a time when European politicians in reality wield little power, an entertainer for a post-ideological age, an outsized figure for the bored and drugged-on-reality-shows masses, a sharp dresser for a world where image is everything.
There is something to all that. This has been a strange European crisis. You catch glimpses of desperation across the Continent but there is enough bread and a sufficient variety of circuses, it seems, to prevent an uprising. People want to be amused; technology caters to that. There is anger at the rich but also a strong undercurrent of fascination. The centers of European capitals drip with money, real-estate brokers and brands. There is a market, among the global super-rich, for the rule of law. Old Europe has that.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, was no Berlusconi, but he did have the same attraction to money (if not the same wealth), the same thirst for the limelight, the same short fuse, the same adrenalin-stoked persona. The French tired of him. They went to the other extreme, voted for a “Monsieur Normal” in François Hollande. Now they cannot forgive themselves. Hollande, it seems, is too normal to provide any distraction from the crisis.
Of course, Berlusconi was very much a product of Italy, even if also something more. Italian national politics was more important when I covered the country in the 1980’s. The U.S. Embassy up on the Via Veneto was crammed with diplomats (and agents) fretting about the soft underbelly of the NATO alliance and the possibility of suave Italian Communists entering government. Still, politics was an elaborate game, a blocked system of patronage and cronyism, its permissible limits set by the American-dictated veto of the Communist Party, in a nation where allegiances are local.
It was difficult to take Rome altogether seriously. A city that has been the chief protagonist of history, but is no longer, bears a heavy burden. It is bound to the daily contemplation of gilded palaces given over to diminished business and beautiful ruins swarmed over by the Japanese. No wonder Rome’s thing was luxury not exertion. It often struck me as a waif in an extravagant gown.
Which brings me to Paolo Sorrentino’s masterpiece, “The Great Beauty” (“La Grande Bellezza”), a movie about nothing (its blocked novelist hero is fascinated that Flaubert wanted to write a novel about nothing) and just about everything, in particular the debauched, conga-dancing, self-deluding desperation of a Roman bourgeoisie given carte blanche to go out in style (aren’t all the Italian cruise ships sinking?) by the Berlusconi era. It is a beautiful film. Nobody does beauty like the Italians. It is also a troubling portrait of Europe’s crisis, full of hypocrisies, lies, bitterness, cruelty and empty sex. You swoon from the loveliness Sorrentino conjures only to wake up haunted.
Jep Gambardella, the novelist-hero with his ever-impeccable pocket square, asks a woman he is about to seduce what she does. “I am rich.” Great job, he comments. In another scene, he is accused of being a misogynist. No, he insists, not at all, “I’m a misanthropist.” On which he is duly congratulated: “When hate is involved, you must aim high!”
A young girl hurls paint at a blank canvas that she then claws (and is paid millions); a Japanese tourist drops dead; the beautiful people are amused by a knife-thrower; lives lie in tatters; a giraffe makes an appearance, as do storks and a dwarf with influence and a would-be saint aged 104 (“Really? She looks older.”). Gambardella’s best friend, frustrated in love, frustrated in his writing, decides to leave. He gives his verdict: “Rome has disappointed me.”
The spectacle is gorgeous. But the whiff of barbarism is unmistakable, as is the knowledge this European “culture” comes from the top.
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