Since his formative years within the New Neapolitan Cinema and debut with L'uomo in più (2001), Paolo Sorrentino has developed into the most celebrated and arguably most significant Italian filmmaker of the New Millennium. With the international commercial success of Le conseguenze dell'amore (2004), the Cannes Jury Prize for Il divo (2008) and the Academy Award for La grande bellezza (2013), his rise has been unparalleled in recent Italian cinema. Yet until very recently, his cinema has not received the academic scholarship it deserves, with only a handful of useful – but not definitive – books in Italian and a smattering of monograph and journal articles in English. This has all changed in the past couple of years with the publication of a wide-ranging special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies (7:3, 2019, also edited by Annachiara Mariani) and an essential monograph by Russell Kilbourn, The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Wallflower, 2020). What need and purpose does this second edited collection serve, then? How is its approach distinct from the other publications? And what does it add to our understanding of Sorrentino?
The first question can be answered by re-emphasising Sorrentino's cultural importance and drawing attention to the diversity of his work, which includes Italian-language films, international co-productions in the English language and – with The Young Pope (2016) and its sequel The New Pope (2019) – series produced for television/streaming. This leads us onto the second question, to which we can respond that this collection conforms to an emphasis within contemporary film scholarship on modern cinema's transnational and transmedia dimensions. Thus it centres specifically on Sorrentino's output since 2011's This Must Be the Place, reprinting a couple of essays already published elsewhere alongside many new and original pieces. In this way, the book clearly positions itself as a convenient, single volume comprising the best of contemporary scholarship on Sorrentino whilst embracing a plurality of approaches that complements Kilbourn's unifying, single-voiced account of Sorrentino's career trajectory thus far. Despite this plurality, the various essays are nonetheless united by their shared emphasis on Sorrentino as a fully-fledged auteur whose work centres on ‘the human struggle against the loss of relevance’ (p. xvii) and by the overarching emphasis on his crossing of national, linguistic and media boundaries. The book is organised in four sections dedicated to Sorrentino's ‘Ethos’, the ‘Real and Symbolic Spaces’ that make up his cinema, and his ‘Psyche’, with the final section concentrating on a ‘Post-secular’ analysis of the two Pope series. The volume then concludes with a useful (if slightly incongruous) interview with Sorrentino's regular costume designer, Carlo Poggioli. In this way, the book lends itself to reading either cover-to-cover or in a partial and piecemeal fashion, depending on the depth and focus of the reader's own interest in Sorrentino.
What, then, of the final question as to what it adds to our understanding of Sorrentino? Despite the pluralism of its approach, a single volume cannot possibly cover all the possible avenues for understanding Sorrentino's cinema, but the quality of scholarship on display here is unquestionably high and it undoubtedly achieves its stated aim of ‘open[ing] the field for a novel and unique exegesis of Sorrentino's opus’ (p. xxvii) and thus will be enlightening even to readers familiar with the aforementioned publications and Italian-language scholarship. A large portion of the book is dedicated to La grande bellezza and the two Pope series (each receive specific treatment in no less than five essays) and this probably reflects the fact that these are the most familiar works to mainstream and non-Italianist scholars. Yet this is also a surprising choice, given that this is the second volume in Intellect's Trajectories of Italian Cinema & Media series. It also means that some of Sorrentino's greatest accomplishments, such as Il divo, receive relatively little attention (the one notable exception being Lydia Tuan's insightful essay on Sorrentino's ‘cinematic excess’). However, I should add that these are also the films which have received the most (and the best) scholarship to date, and the consequent shift in focus frees up space to address in more detail films that have generated greater consternation and ambivalence on the part of both audiences and critics. Notable, in this regard, are Ellen Nerenberg and Matteo Gilebbi's two essays on Youth and Nicoletta Marini-Maio's excellent account of Sorrentino's typically idiosyncratic treatment of Berlusconi, Loro (2018), each of which prompted me to rethink these films.
Overall, this is an extremely valuable contribution to Sorrentino scholarship that, especially when read in conjunction with Kilbourn's monograph, provides a provocative, wide-ranging and thought-provoking overview of Sorrentino's originality and significance. Moreover, it does not fail to engage with the more controversial and divisive aspects of his work, such as his treatment of gender (addressed in essays by Russell Kilbourn and Nicoletta Marini-Maio) and alleged privileging of style over content (addressed in essays by Lydia Tuan and Michela Barisonzi). The book should be of great interest to anyone concerned with Italian cinema, contemporary Italian culture, or the state of global film and television today. Sorrentino has finally achieved the recognition he deserves within academia and I am sure this exciting new collection will only serve as a spur to further scholarship.
