Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Neatly setting up two targets, the pompous egoism of far right wind bag populism, greedy, corrupt and manipulative, contrasted with the self centred paranoia of talkative left wing indecision, the film uses the 'film within a film' motif in a fluid satire of contemporary Italian delusions.

The story begins with the kidnapping of the Berlusconi figure, presented as a rising Arturo Ui type, who has made his money from melons, both literal and figurative, in a provincial Italian city. This is quickly revealed to be part of a short being made by a Genoa based independent film group and the stories take off in a nicely balanced integration of the two fictions. A pretentious optimist would draw parallels with Truffaut's 'Day for Night', but 'Bye Bye Berlusconi' has another 'raison d'etre'. This is not a film that exalts film making, rather the paltry attempts to make a political short film are contrasted with the banal depths of the politicised mainstream Italian media.

Because its a comedy, we overlook the slightly outdated vision of Italy presented. The kind of people who supported the film's production, like Die Zeit editor, Giovanni di Lorenzo, a portmanteau figure in the german Media, or advertising man Oliver Voss from the agency Jung von Matt are conspicuous by their absense from the 'mise-en-scene'. This is an Italy without a European dimension, an unglobalised province, where actors remember the protests in Genoa against globalisation, but have no real sense of their participation in its machinations as minor agents of globalisation. The one character who lives in Berlin is presented as experiencing a kind of cultural exile, whereas as most young Italians in Berlin are here at the behest of the Erasmus programme of student exchange run from Brussels. Of all its potential audience, they are probably the people who will enjoy this film the most, but it will also appeal to a broader group of ageing lefties and aspirant media radicals. It should also go down well among the Chiantishire afficionados of Italian summer holidays, as they take a break from the nasty realities of keeping up with their credit card payments the rest of the year.