A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

Katy Evans-Bush thinks much can be learned from an unsuccessful poem about what makes poems fail. She shows us the other Ozymandias, written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith in that famous competition. One can only hope that Smith himself saw instantly how outclassed he was. Do go there and read it - it's most instructive.

I've long had a fantasy of editing an anthology of bad poems, with a commentary, as a tool of instruction, but Nicholas Parsons got there first with his Joy of bad Verse. Lack of imagination, failure of nerve, and above all a lack of sensitivity to language are the commonest failings. McGonagall is treasured for his tin ear and his heroic mastery of bathos. Smith isn't in this sort of class either. He's just not terribly good.

But perhaps it's not so much what makes Smith's poem fail, as noticing, as Katy does, that it has a couple of good bits. And it's a question of what makes Shelley's poem so good. Where Shelley makes things up, and visualises them for us, Smith's poem is for the most part literal, unimaginative. He doesn't recognise the potential in the data. Starting with the same material as Shelley, almost every decision he makes is conventional:

Here's the fragment of statue, all alone; the Leg is all that's left of the civilisation; it could be the same for London one day. Civilisations pass. Smith takes Ozymandias for granted, is uninquisitive about the nature of power, save for its transience.

The first good bit - and I concur with her judgement - is the image of the Hunter "[thro' the wilderness/ where London stood,] holding the Wolf in chace". I don't know why Katy likes this bit, but I like it because it gives us an identifiable agent in the poem in contrast to the undefined and almost abstract "We"), and a new perspective of time, a sense of the altered state of London now a forest; that lovely period diction "holding the Wolf in chace" manages to suggest a relationship between the Hunter and hunted, some kind of controlled distance, like a dog on a lead. The Hunter is skilled. There is something intimate about it.

And how distracting that Hunter would find "some fragment huge", so ill-defined and unexpected, on his purposeful quest. It distracts us too: I wondered how a bit of statue had got from Egypt to London - via the British Museum perhaps? - before I pulled myself together. Oh, and I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

The second good bit she identifies is the closing couplet, and I must admit it raised a smile to my lips too. The polysyllabic adjectives cling to monosyllabic, simplistic rhymes. The second adjective, in the last line, is even longer than the first, so when the second shoe drops there is a fitting sense of build-up and bathos. It's interesting that Smith felt the need to relate the desert statue back to the situation of the assumed reader. He couldn't trust the statue itself, or the reader, to do the work, but had to draw an explicit moral: "some Hunter may express/ Wonder like ours..." The switched focus leaches energy from the original image. Not that the original image is very clear; it's treated as a given. There is something almost comic about the "gigantic Leg" because it could be anything. Actually there is one other almost good bit, which is the "[gigantic Leg], which far off throws/ The only shadow that the Desart knows".

Shelley lets the statue be the focus. His Ozymandias is a story, "I met a traveller... who said..." and it is the traveller who describes the statue. By putting the words into his mouth, he manages to give it an oral immediacy, both an authority (literally) and mythic status, a distance and a reason for being told.

And thereafter the focus is on the statue. Well, not exactly - because in piecing the statue together, Shelley conjures the subject of the statue himself, zooming in on the "frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" and even the hapless sculptor. We are right there with the antique traveller, seeing a tyrant's statue. And its empty boast. The poem is filmic in its attention. One could use Shelley's poem as a shooting script for a short. And the genius of the ending, which leaves the poem at the point where Horace Smith started his: the bare and level sands stretch far away.

Street art

Photo: Bailout by Slaminsky


Annie at Slaminsky has come back from New York with a fab slide show of street art.

Here are a few more sites for your delectation:

Brooklyn Street Art

c-monster: Eclectic, informed and witty art blog

El Celso: colourful, unpredictable, and not worksafe

wooster collective: A celebration of street art from all round the world

Bombing Science: Graffiti Pictures and Graffiti Supplies
Interesting forums. One thread on How to cook wheatpaste is enlightening about the consequences of not using the product quickly enough:

well, i'm sitting on my floor in my room watching Comedy Central when out of nowhere, i hear my backpack start to make this weird fizzing noise, it almost sounded like a zipper. anyways, i looked through my backpack for the source as it was increasing in sound, when i realized it was coming from my bottle of wheatpaste. well me being the idiot that i am i decied it would be best to pop up that littl cap thingy to give it some air.
THAT WAS THE WRONG THING TO DO!
the very second i opened it, BLAM! wheatpaste all over my room. i was left there watching the wheat paste LITERALLY spray out of the tube, as i franticly try to figure out what to do (so just seal the cap again right? well it wasn't til after the whole ordeal that i realized i should have.)

Lucky

I am a member of The Poetry Society. The confession seems in need of some justification. Years ago, it was a way of keeping in touch when I didn't have any other contacts. These days, as well as Poetry Review, a members' newsletter, a local Stanza group and the right to use club premises on certain terms, membership can have unexpected benefits. Unannounced, there arrived in my letterbox a 200+ page poetry collection, lavishly illustrated (as they say) and larded with endorsements:

X is the real thing. I love reading his verse and you will too.
Stephen Fry

This is marvellous stuff... a 21st century Kipling. He rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter, and melody.
Tom Wolfe

Annoyingly good.
Hugh Grant

I enjoy his poetry immensely.
Mick Jagger

You feel he lived it so richly, so dangerously, that he could be wise for our delight.
Dr Robert Woof, Director of The Wordsworth Trust

A fantastic collection! Rich, sumptuous and beautifully threaded.
Jon Snow

If Waugh were still alive, he would fall on X's verse with a glad cry of recognition and approval.
John Walsh

That would be Auberon Waugh, then. I love John Walsh. He can be a devil at times.

Here's an extract from On Entering My New 'Writer's Cottage' on Mustique For The First Time:

Here in a fastness, filled with light
In view of a turquoise sea,
A fool has banished himself to write,
And, oh, that fool is me.

A fellow member of The Poetry Society came up to me the other day, apopleptic that someone could have bought the right to a PoSoc mailshot when there are so many more talented poets around crying out to be heard.

While I don't have a lot of time for the Mustique musings, such as I have read, I don't quite share her sense of outrage. Poetry isn't a zero sum game. No other poets were denied a purchase by this publicity stunt.* The mailout wrapper makes it quite clear that the gift is not from The Poetry Society, but from the generous donor. No doubt he paid handsomely for the privilege. Are they supposed to turn down such a gift on behalf of their members, and if so, who would make that decision and on what grounds? Should they turn it down if it were (just supposing any were rich enough and so inclined) from Simon Armitage, The Wordsworth Trust, Jeremy Prynne? Should they turn it down if it were a consignment of fresh coconuts? Yes to this last, presumably, on the grounds that fresh coconuts are outside the remit of The Poetry Society and the delivery of unsolicited fresh coconuts to members might amount to a nuisance. (Though personally I wouldn't mind them sending me a voucher for a free coconut, courtesy of the Mustique Development Agency, so that I could take advantage of the generous offer if I chose.)


She was almost incoherent with rage, but I think what my acquaintance was objecting to was the fact that Mr Felix Dennis (for it is he) is rich, and the further fact that publicity can be bought. And the fact that it can be bought, apparently, by anyone rich enough. Or at least by a rich poet she disapproves of. She is also exercised by the idea that the very use of The Poetry Society's mailing machine might give his publication some kind of imprimatur. (I am not sure what value should be attached to The Poetry Society's imprimatur. The Poetry Society arrogates to itself the definite article.) And not least, she is exercised by the perception that good poets can find it very hard to get published, let alone get publicity.

I haven't put it to her, but I wonder if she isn't also slightly bothered by the suspicion that innocent members of The Poetry Society might pick it up and actually like it. Dennis has made his fortune by an astute reading of popular taste.


*P.S. In fact, Dennis sponsors the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, under the auspices of the Forward Arts Foundation. This puts £5000 into the hands of a new poet, along with a fair bit of publicity.

The State of Play

Was there ever a movie about investigative journalism where the future of the paper isn't on the line?

Having missed the BBC series I could watch this with an open mind. It pushes paranoia buttons about NorthCom, corrupt defence procurement, jumbo corporations and privatised homeland security. It's a pacy political thriller, with some very familiar tropes: the maverick boozy journo, the editor anxious about the bottom line, the dodgy pols, the love interest/conflict of interest, the abrasive police, the dangerous assignation, the sleazy bar, the deadline, and so on. There is even an underground carpark sequence, so it's a lot of fun.

Russell Crowe is terrific as the slobby maverick journo. Helen Mirren as the editor is a sort of cross between Tina Brown and Anna Wintour. Ben Affleck, though well-groomed as a Congressman, lacks gravitas and steel.

The film could have ended many minutes earlier, and been a different, simpler, and perhaps more satisfying piece. There are too many improbable plot twists, and so many loose ends I gave up counting, so many circling black helicopters that never land. I wondered whether room was being made for a sequel.

At a time when print journalism is under greater threat than ever, it makes a traditional plea for inky hands. It's worth seeing the movie - which is never boring - simply for the beautiful credit sequence, following the paper to the press and on to distribution: this coda is a soaring hymn to newsprint.

La Vie Moderne

When I first visited rural southern France in the early 70s, some farmers were still ploughing with oxen. Even now, you can find old ox-ploughs rusting under a hedge – where there are still hedges. My parents have lived there nearly 30 years, and during that time we have seen farmers retire, their children move away, cattle sold, vineyards grubbed up, fields amalgamated, and the growth of tourism.

In La Vie Moderne photojournalist Raymond Depardon records the life of farmers in the Cévennes. It is part of an ongoing project dear to his heart. As a farmer's son, he has a great sympathy for them, and they open up to him as best they can, though it’s clear some of them are not completely at ease with the camera. The interiors are so familiar: the solemn pendule in the background, the open fire, the long kitchen table with the oilcloth, the plate of vanilla flavoured biscuits, the scuffed tin of sugarcubes pushed towards the visitor for the bitter coffee. You have to keep them in a tin because of mice.

The landscape is achingly beautiful. To strains of Fauré, the camera tracks up and down narrow country lanes, dives into valleys, past snowbound forests and shuttered houses, halts at a barbed wire gate. The people who scrape a living from the mountainside are dying out. Villages are ghosts of themselves. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories, to contemplate the passing of a whole way of life, something which for generations had seemed so permanent. The way of life was backbreaking and brought little reward. Young people these days demand more. It is the loss of a culture. The loss of the language (Occitan) began even earlier.

Even here they now use tractors. Little of the old soundscape remains now but the bells on the brebis as they scramble down over the rocks to their barn for the night.

The film makes no argument beyond presenting a few farmers and their families to talk about the hardships of their existence, their hopes and fears for the future. The first family consisted of two elderly bachelor brothers and their nephew, who had got himself a wife from up North via a lonely hearts ad. He seemed well pleased with life, apparently oblivious to the jealousy and pain occasioned by the introduction of his new family - a wife and her daughter, people from elsewhere, who didn't understand the district, or farming, and showed insufficient deference to their elders.

One of the most poignant was a man who lived alone in a state of some neglect. His hair was long and matted, and he chainsmoked. For the entire session, he was glued to his ancient television watching the funeral mass for Abbé Pierre (founder of Emmaus). Without taking his eyes off the screen, he answered the questions almost monosyllabically:
- Are you a Catholic?
- No.
- Were you baptised a Catholic?
- No. I’m Protestant.
- Do you go to church?
- No.
And so on. I found all this disconcerting. The television was clearly his constant companion, and on this occasion enabled him to share in a national day of mourning. It seemed rather rude to persist in questioning when the interviewer had dropped in unannounced on this particular day. For all his sensitivity elsewhere, Depardon seemed curiously unalert in this instance - except that it made a telling piece of film, albeit partly at his own expense.

Although the film has received rave notices, it is not an obvious hit. There is little pacing, no polemic. There are odd flashes of wit but nothing to stop the viewer from nodding off for a minute or two. The voice of the interviewer slows things down, keeping a sense of distance between audience and subject.

I never saw any of those programmes about Hannah Hauxwell, but suspect that focusing on one family in the Cévennes might have made more engaging viewing than La Vie Moderne in its dutiful progress round the valleys. But Depardon’s aim is to be more faithfully representative of the different types of farmer and family set-ups. He is more of a collector than a specialist. Nor is this a visual Akenfield. We are so used to documentaries which edit out the questions, giving the impression that the participants are speaking freely for themselves, that the questioning, with all the rephrasings, repetitions – one of the participants was pretty deaf – and awkward silences, feels rough-hewn. Perhaps the documentary maker who is also a photojournalist wishes to display more regard for the “truth” of the present moment, even if that includes the non-answer and considerable longueurs. Why not say what happened? Yet he doesn't hesitate to stage a shot, to position the camera in the best place - the far side of a cow who is crumpled on the floor with mastitis, her grieving owner beyond... And heaven knows what went on the cutting room floor. As a photographer, he'd be used to culling the one image out of a thousand. Perhaps it's a category error to want something more rigorous from a documentary too.

However, that's a personal gripe that no-one else seems to share. And this is without question a valuable record of the remnants of a community that will have disappeared the way of the ox-plough within a generation.

WoT

Robbie G1, who created the slogan, credits
jamesholden.net/billboard/, who created the app. Go there to make your own billboards.

Via Hatherley.

Gun control

Dr Omed got a gun

Jesus got a gun

True facts of the Tulsa Gun Show

Janie's Got a Gun
[Video not available in your country]

Oh shit wrong chord

South West Airlines have the rhymes

London's lease hath all too short a date

Diamond Geezer draws our attention to

The Golf Sale. The legendary never-ending Golf Sale. The sports shop down a Mayfair sidestreet near Oxford Circus. The iconic Golf Sale advertised along Oxford Street by men with sandwich boards since time immemorial. Much imitated, never beaten. The Golf Sale. Closing down. Nip down to Maddox Street fast if you want to snap up a cut-price putter...

The lease is up.

Three landowners control most of the West End:
The Portman Estate

The Portman Estate is principally located within Marylebone, central London.

It encompasses Oxford Street from Marble Arch to Orchard Street, from Edgware Road in the west to beyond Baker Street in the east, and stretches north almost to Crawford Street. The Estate includes Portman Square, Manchester Square and the residential squares of Bryanston and Montague.

The Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor Estate)

Key locations in Mayfair are: Mount Street, Grosvenor Street, North Audley Street, Duke Street, Park Street
Key locations in Belgravia are: Grosvenor Gardens, Motcomb Street, Elizabeth Street, Eaton Square, Pimlico Road, Ebury Street

and HM the Queen. Details of Crown London holdings here.

(Not forgetting Cadogan Estates' massive - though diminishing - holdings in Chelsea.)

Between them, they own enough to make the market.

The Portman website advertises retail premises to let:

Shops are available on new Full Repairing and Insuring leases for 5 years, without rent review and outside the Security of tenure provisions of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954.

Are we just starting to see the effects of the 2004 amendments to the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954? And we've just passed Lady Day, when rents are due... I'd love to know more, but alas do not have a subscription to Estates Gazette. What sort of business is prepared to take on a five year full repairing lease without right of renewal? Someone selling Olympic tschotskes, maybe? You'd have to be reckless, unless there were no choice.

The erosion of tenants' rights that began under the Tories has continued apace under New Labour. Under the guise of market liberalisation, most new residential lets are unprotected; new agricultural and business lettings suffer the same sort of insecurity. It doesn't allow a business to put down roots. It doesn't make for cohesive communities. It can cause dreadful hardship. It took generations to build up security of tenure but it seems to have been pissed away in under twenty years.

On their website (which doesn't let me link to a specific page) the Cadogan Estate exonerates itself from blame for the homogenisation of the High Street:

Today, Cadogan's holding in Chelsea is substantial in value, but is nevertheless still patchy. The assumption, for instance, that Cadogan owns everything on the King's Road is wrong. And the associated assumption that Cadogan is therefore responsible for the influx of High Street brands is profoundly inaccurate.

Not their fault, then. No-one's fault.

Not a day longer

from 10 Downing Street
to e-petition signatories

date 3 April 2009 15:44
subject Government response to petition 'notadaylonger'
mailed-bypetitions.pm.gov.uk

hide details 3 Apr (2 days ago) Reply

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to "Stop seeking to further extend pre-charge detention."

The Prime Minister's Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18895

Prime Minister's Office

Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/notadaylonger/


Bastards.

Cambridge poets

I thought Plane Debris was terrific, in the top Heliogabalus class. Sweat ran out of my ears, and still does, a sheer delirium.

J H Prynne


Back in the early nineties I joined a workshop run by Stephen Rodefer, who was then Judith E Wilson Fellow at Magdalene. (At the time, he'd only published in the States, but recently Carcanet has brought out a Selected, Call it Thought.) At our first seminar, he wrote on the board the names of some English poets with whom we should all be familiar. I've still got the notes somewhere, but from memory they included John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, John Riley, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Rod Mengham... there were about a dozen names, and I hadn't heard of any of them - though I was familiar with names in the PBS catalogue, Poetry Review and so on. I can't for the life of me remember whether Prynne's name was on the list or whether he was taken as a given - certainly he was a presiding spirit, and Rodefer was glad to be breathing the Cambridge air. Most of my fellow students were familiar with many of these poets (a couple were Prynne's students), and with Americans like Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley etc, whom I'd never heard of. [Shamed.] My reading in those days was random, and I had a sense it was a bit restricted which is one of the reasons I joined this course.

(It was another 6-7 years before I got online, and people tend to forget what it was like back in those days.)

It was an enriching experience. It was there that I first encountered a personification of OuLiPo, the legendary Harry Mathews, who featured in the terrific series of readings that Rodefer organised for us. We also heard Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Christopher Middleton, Wendy Mulford and others. It was wider than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, though all his guests had that passion for words as words first, rather than simply as means to an end. For the first time since student magazines, I was brought face to face with poetry that didn't make sense in any obvious way. Some of it was non-linear, some was syntactically disrupted, some played with the sounds words made:

An error is mirror to the truth
than any statement claiming to be true.

Rodefer, Plane Debris (Four Lectures)

At one seminar Rodefer produced for especial scorn a recent TLS with a poem by (let's call him) JG. Although it was quite vivid it wasn't, to be honest, a remarkable poem, particularly in retrospect now I have read so many other poems a bit like it - about dealing with the effects of an elderly relative as a consequence of their going into a nursing home. It began with an image of the narrator and his siblings picking over the household effects like gulls. "See!" said Rodefer, "that's what I really hate about this sort of poem: it gets a little movie camera going in your head" [here he makes cranking motions with his hand near his ear] - "poets should leave that kind of thing to the movies. Movies do it much better. We can't be satisfied with the visual now. Poets have to move on. It's our duty to foreground language."

(Of course he was a real film buff, and fascinated by the interaction between poem and film - but that's another story.)

So while we have our mainstream workshops urging things like Show don't Tell and all the other orthodox mantra, LangPo is doing something rather different. I read quite a lot of stuff around then, and went to a lot of readings, but on the whole it didn't excite me enough. I could never work out how to tell whether it was being done well or badly, because I never really "got" the point of much of it. At the same time, I was keen to pick up anything that might be useful, but heaven knows whether it shows. I doubt it. (I try to remember his advice: "Be bolder along the axis of selection.")

What I couldn't bear was the animosity that so often went with LangPo - that the Mainstream had sold out to Mammon, that the Mainstream pandered to the lowest common denominator, that the Mainstream was capitalist and anti-socialist, that the Mainstream perpetuated archaic values, that Mainstream writers were beneath contempt. At the same time, I was going to mainstream poetry readings and it was interesting in Q & A sessions to drop my bit of sodium into the water by asking them what they thought of Prynne.

The loathing was mutual, and it still baffles me. It may well be a testosterone thing, as it's not simply political. Now Bloodaxe has published Prynne's Collected (a book whose purchase-to-reading ratio must be close to A Brief History of Time) perhaps the barriers have come down a bit. While they remain, it's sad and an impoverishment of poetry. There are poets who earn respect from both sides, such as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, WS Graham, John Kinsella, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley....

Hell, this is worth more than a cursory anecdote. I'll return to the subject when I've collected my thoughts more intelligently.

Village life

The Party Planner's shop has closed. I only patronised it once (for Hallowe'en, and not for me, and it's a long story), because it didn't sell anything I wanted. It appears it didn't sell enough of what other villagers wanted either. Not for them the party poppers, bouncy castle, personalised helium balloons. Not for them the dream wedding limo hire. Perhaps the reality was just too cruel.

Il Divo

Quite a contrast with last week's movie, this stylish piece from Sorrentino foregrounds cinematographic technique with clever background music to make a drama which never pretends to the documentary. It deals with the top end of society, its manners, masks and gross corruptions. The children in Entre les Murs are saints by comparison. Knowing little of Italian politics - though I remember the perennial Andreotti, the whiff of corruption that hung about him, the tragedies of Aldo Moro and Falcone, and the endlessly interrogated mystery of Calvi (and how can any of these be called "politics"? Oh, and I recall learning back in school that Italy's system of proportional representation led to inherently unstable government and unpalatable dealmaking) - even knowing so little, I found it compelling. A huge amount must have been over my head. I don't know enough to know what percentage that might be but guess it's well north of 50: I don't speak Italian; I know precious little about their political structures; I don't know the names of the politicians, nor remember them from one scene to the next so was frequently lost. But I'd gladly go again, and not just to pick up a few of the threads I missed first time round. For the most part, it's fascinating viewing. The very few longueurs are places where too much explanation is being given, and are defined only by the drive of the rest of the film.

Jumpcuts, flashbacks, flashforwards and leitmotifs create depth and texture. The fizzing glass of migraine cure marks the end of an Act. The focus on his curious hands has its own strange language once his secretary explains it to his inexplicable visitor.

Let's take her as an example of the ambiguity the film revels in. A woman appears at his office, sur commande. She is attractive, very nervous - frightened even. Her blouse is undone by one too many buttons for her to be respectable. Yet she has crows' feet - she must be fortyfive if she's a day, far too old to be a prostitute. What other explanation can there be? She seeks advice from the loyal secretary as if an ingénue from a madam. When she meets Andreotti she is shy, but embraces him. They talk of intimacy, she says she explores herself... The camera focuses on his hair, his physicality. The next time we see her she is on the arm of an Ambassador, and when someone asks her about her painting dismisses it: "I just dabble." Can we believe that Andreotti, whose power could command whomsoever he could choose, would choose a woman d'un certain age to be his companion of the night, or a "dabbler" to paint his portait?

This is a drama, so we can take it only as a means to the construction of a character - one who is undemonstrative, enigmatic.

And yes, so much comes down to the physical presence. Much as there's a hint of The West Wing in that encounter on the diplomat's arm at the ball, even though it's taking the trope of embarrassed recognition to put a different spin on it, so there is an inescapable comparison with Richard III. At least for the English. Er, well, there's the intelligence, the dead bodies strewn on the path to power. And the hunchback. I am ashamed to mention it. Yet it's undeniably there. If we're going to be politically incorrect here, let's go the whole hog and suggest that the Italians, in common with their French neighbours, are much less bothered by political correctness than the Anglo-Saxons.

But like Entre les Murs, it is an intelligent film, treats its audience like adults. And engaged. Whereas Entre les Murs listens to children for once, and shows teachers to be fallible - and neither of them perfect - this film ironises Andreotti's claims to innocence. He is never seen to mandate anything. Enemies die right and left; he prays. The only hint of guilt is circumstantial: the kiss. Later, he jokes that a politician must take care whom he associates with: think of Jesus and Judas. Later still, there is a parody of Leonardo's Last Supper where associates meet to anoint him presidential candidate. No-one kisses and betrays him. They all toast him with wine, white and red, even the cardinal, while he toasts with migraine remedy, his cup of bitterness and guilt.

And his physicality is amazing. Toni Servillo as Andreotti manages to make his neck disappear. He wears a hunchback. His curious hands have a role of their own: praying, or marking pleasure or displeasure. He holds his body still as if nothing could move him. His stillness exemplifies his power - and occasionally his vulnerability.

It's overdone in places, no question. The ears are too much. The abject senator whose name I forget (the ugly, stupid one who complains that A never showed him any affection) is a caricature. No-one would vote for him. The kingmaker whose name I forget wouldn't have tested the slide of the marble floor IRL even if he fancied himself as a funky dancer. The scene after Andreotti is indicted, where he is sitting with his wife who is channel-hopping to avoid the appalling news - very stagey, but effective. After many channel-hops she finds a station playing a torch song and as the two of them sit there and she reaches out a hand to him and tears up, you can't be sure whether she is weeping for her husband, or the man she thought he was.

Along with the swooping and savvy camera work, an extraordinarily eclectic range of incidental music, sometimes so brief it was over before I noticed it.

The credits played to this:


Update
Why I walked out of my own biopic: an interview with Andreotti about the film here.