Short Takes

IL DIVO
Hard on the heels of the acclaimed Gomorrah, Italian corruption gets a much quieter but equally vigorous workout in Paolo Sorrentino's highly stylized portrait of the country's most enduring political leader, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Teflon doesn't begin to describe the Christian Democrat who led one after another of Italy's rapid succession of administrations and survived a major bribery and corruption investigation, while opponents and former allies dropped mysteriously dead around him. Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy, with Sorrentino deploying every formal tool in his arsenal to disrupt facile interpretations of Andreotti's strategically opaque character. Toni Servillo plays Andreotti with brilliant restraint as a physically disconnected man whose curling ears and still, round-shouldered gait hilariously—and pathetically—recall the desiccated food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille. We learn that Andreotti was a cultured wit with a gift—like this movie—for aphoristic quotation; that he suffered from debilitating headaches; that, in his way, he loved his wife, who loved him back in hers. His solitary nocturnal strolls, surrounded by burly blokes with machine guns, offer one of the movie's few clues to the price he paid for his obsessive lock-hold on power. Aside from an imaginary "confession" in which he grows momentarily unhinged, Andreotti remains a properly unknowable monument on his country's shadowy, shady political landscape. In Italian with subtitles. (Opens Friday at The Belcourt) Ella Taylor

EASY VIRTUE
Quick! Noël Coward—sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off. The movie opens with a contemporary rendition of Coward's "Mad About the Boy," impressively sung by Jessica Biel, her customary luminous self as a Roaring Twenties American race car driver who marries into British aristocracy and finds herself on the losing end of a war of words with the groom's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). Though Elliott, director of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, gussies up the action with clever and lyrical visuals, words are what count in this scantily plotted piece (hard to believe that Hitchcock made a silent version in 1928), a light variant on Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan with the same libertarian message that the morally compromised inherit the earth while the self-righteous wither on the vine. A uniformly great cast (Kris Marshall is a scream as the eye-rolling butler) is upstaged by a hilariously WASP-ish Thomas, who strides away with the movie wearing sensible cardies, QE II hair, and all the best lines as Mummy Dearest, with Colin Firth modestly bringing up the rear as her war-ruined lush of a husband. Easy Virtue may seem like little more than a big, fat mother-in-law joke, but Elliott pointedly recasts it as a nail in the coffin of an increasingly irrelevant gentry. (Opens Friday at Green Hills) Ella Taylor

WINCHESTER '73
If you only know James Stewart on screen as a gangly screwball-comedy ingénue, a genial family man or a folksy old-timer, prepare to be blasted out of your boots by his snarling action-hero turn in Winchester '73. The first of five epochal psycho-Westerns Stewart made with director Anthony Mann, the 1950 revenge drama heralds a shift away from the conventional horse opera and its white-hatted heroics to the head games and amoral bloodshed of the '60s spaghetti Westerns. Stewart plays the vengeance-driven marksman pursuing the punk who made off with the prize rifle Stewart won in a shooting match; as the rifle changes hands, the plot veers off down unexpected trails. Mann was one of the movies' masters of composition, capable of evoking claustrophobia and coiled menace even in the vast expanse of a canyon, and no chance to see one of his films on the big screen should be passed up. The movie shows Saturday through Monday at The Belcourt as part of its first-rate summer-long Western series. JIM RIDLEY

• The Middle Tennessee chapter of the Association for the Future of Film & Television (AFFT), the statewide trade organization formed to give the state's film, video and TV industry some needed legislative muscle, hosts an open house, mixer and membership drive 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday, June 18, at NorthStar Studios, 3201 Dickerson Pike. There'll be food and drink, studio tours, and prizes ranging from equipment rentals, movie passes and edit time to restaurant gift certificates and pre-season Titans tickets. For more information, contact affttennessee@yahoo.com or see affttennessee.org.