Belluscone. A Sicilian Story (2014) Belluscone. Una storia siciliana

Sicilian filmmaker and satirist Franco Maresco is both the director and one of the subjects of Belluscone: A Sicilian Story (Belluscone: Una Storia Italiana), an occasionally hilarious wannabe-documentary about Maresco’s failed attempts to make a film about former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged ties to the mafia. Only in a work by Maresco could this mean that Berlusconi remains entirely off-screen, while the director himself shares the spotlight with a film critic, a shady talent manager and two popular local singers who get into a fight over a song called I want to meet Berlusconi. A crowd-pleaser with left-leaning audiences in Italy, if its raucous Venice reception is any indication, this represents a tougher but not impossible sell abroad, as the film’s frame of reference is thoroughly local.

Film critic Tatti Sanguineti – who also co-wrote and appeared in Maresco and Daniele Cipri’s similarly slippery docu-fiction How We Got the Italian Movie Business Into Trouble: The True Story of Franco and Ciccio from 2004 – has arrived in Palermo, Sicily’s capital, to investigate whatever became of the film Belluscone: A Sicilian Story, which Maresco was supposed to make and which was supposed to expose Berlusconi’s close ties to Sicily and the island’s organized crime lords. Sifting through the material Maresco has left behind, it appears that the film’s protagonists were supposed to be Ciccio Mira, a talent agent with dubious connections, and two young artists from his stable, the singer-songwriter Salvatore De Castro, whose stage name, somewhat incongruously, is Erik, and the boyband-ready vocalist Vittorio Ricciardi, who uses his own name.

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