Long Live Freedom

Enrico Oliveri leads the main opposition party in Italy; the polls are bad, confidence inside the party is gone, and an election is coming. One night he disappears without a word. His inner circle panics and finds a solution: put his twin brother Giovanni in his place. Giovanni is a philosopher who has just come out of a psychiatric hospital. He takes the platform and begins telling the truth. The party's numbers rise. Roberto Andò directs. Toni Servillo plays both brothers. The source is Andò's own novel. The satire is direct. The politician's dull, cautious, empty speech is set against the frankness of a man taken for mad; the audience prefers the second, and the film leaves that as a question. Toni Servillo separates the two characters by posture and speed of speech alone; there is no make up and no trick. Valerio Mastandrea and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi are in the cast. The second strand is the days the vanished leader spends in Paris with a former lover; that section sits outside the satire and moves like a quieter film. It won awards at the David di Donatello in 2013 and was read in Italy inside the political argument of the moment. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political satire and Toni Servillo. Who it is not for: the idea rests on a single joke, the second half slows, and some references are closed without a knowledge of Italian politics.