Abstract

In Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro (2018), Silvio Berlusconi embodies the decline of aging in the symbolic interactions of the regime of the exchange of sex and power. Although it oscillates between the political subject Silvio Berlusconi and the materialistic, decadent anthropology of «Berlusconism», the leader’s body remains symbolically at the film’s centre. Around his figure and his simulacra, the bodies of young women refract and multiply, evoking the hedonism and commodification of Italian society of neoliberalism. Loro brings the self-reflexive narrative of the private and «prohibited» to the centre, therefore furnishing the narrative key to explore, concurrently, the human and grotesque aspects of Berlusconi as well as Berlusconism, and its masks and anthropology