Review: 'Videocracy'

A lot is known about the media empire that helped to create (and sustain) Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's grasp on power. Erik Gandini's documentary "Videocracy" offers a deeper peek into the celebrity-obsessed culture of Italy, but only delivers a tangential indictment of a man who has turned Italy's democracy into a laughing stock of Europe.

Though director Gandini clearly has a knack for weaving images from Italian television, interviews with various well-connected television personalities and official press appearances by Berlusconi together into a single narrative, he misses a crucial opportunity to deliver a punishing blow to the public image of Berlusconi and educate people outside Europe about the dangers of a billionaire who controls the majority of Italy's television stations and newspapers also running a G8 country.

In some sense, "Videocracy" makes up for its lack of a clear thesis with an intriguing storyline; after all, the story of Berlusconi tells itself. Gandini gets extraordinary access to key players in Italy's media scene, many of whom regularly rub elbows with the prime minister. He spends time at the villa of Lele Mora, Italy's top television agent and a Mussolini admirer, and goes on a celebrity photo hunt with paparazzo-turned-fashion mogul/dark knight Fabrizio Corona. Gandini then gets incredible access to parties and events that attract the elite of Italy. And more importantly, he shows that Italian television capitalizes on sex appeal and thrives on objectifying women.

All of these figures, in one way or another, intersect with the narcissistic prime minister (or "president," as he is referred to in the film). These characters are seemingly used to show how Berlusconi, as a television puppetmaster, can shape Italian cultural norms and opinions. But at many points, these sideshow players become main characters in a film that the viewer yearns to see culminate in a central thesis: that Berlusconi's influence is dangerous and is destroying a democracy. Gandini offers the viewer some hope when he shows how a director of a television show on a Berlusconi-owned network is bullied into cutting his program short 10 minutes in order to cut to a Berlusconi speech. But, ultimately, the film only succeeds in making the 73-year-old leader look like nothing more than a womanizer, a charge that he would be proud to agree with.

The film is marketed as an expose of Berlusconi's media empire, yet does little to connect the television obsession of a large majority of Italians to the larger questions of the dangers of Berlusconi's hold on power and public opinion. This is because Gandini fails to illustrate why Italy is a special case. Celebrity obsession and sex-peddling on television programs is nothing exclusive to Italy. If anything, television programmers in the United States have become masters of a formula in which big boobs and long legs get good ratings. Berlusconi's control over outlets that offer these things is fairly innocuous. The more interesting story, and which is more imperative to tell the rest of the world, is how his media control damages any semblance of a free press in a country that so direly needs it.