The Footman

LUCIANO IS A YOUNG LITERATURE TEACHER working extra as a ghostwriter for a famous author. One day he gets an offer to become a speech writer to the minister Botero in Rome. Luciano works hard and soon he's made himself indispensable for the apparently righteous politician. But slowly Luciano discovers that Botero's success is built on cynical swindle and manipulations. His moral is put to a test. The film is a critical portrait of the political corruption in Italy today and contains badly concealed portraits of some big guns in the Socialist party._

Comment:
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS IN PARIS I saw a film by Nanni Moretti. I came out of the movie theater with a lasting impression: the lightness in the story telling, an unpretentious and slightly comical ordinariness not lacking serious under-tones. In other words, the direct opposite of Swedish film, which hardly ever manages to walk the fine line between pure problem dramas - hardly disguised as a story - and pure comedy and seems to make an honor of avoiding any double edges.
Already the introductory scenes of Daniele Luchetti's The Footman puts me immediately in that same, slightly euforic, state of mind, like that time in Paris. It's hardly a coincidence that Moretti both produced and plays one of the main characters in the film.
The story, about political corruption and the abuse of power, have all ingredients to become a truly indignant piece. But Luchetti handles it with a secure hand and instead turns it into a small masterpiece of dark comedy. The film was disliked by Italian politicians, but that's hardly surprising - on the other hand it became one of this year's hits. ''Everything you say can be used against you'' that could be the motto for the main character Luciano's career as a speech writer for the minister. The feeling is Kafkaesque, it's like being ''before the law'' (like in Katka's text). Luciano might write or speak, all he says will return to him from the lips of the minister twisted into a form where Luciano's intentions with what is said are even more deformed.
It's as if the whole world suddenly had been slightly twisted, and yet another world, which Luciano never could have dreamed of, is revealed behind it. A world with touches of the grotesque, of absurd theater. There is a peaceful Beckettian atmosphere in it. In one scene, where Luciano is pulled into the chase for proof of election rigging, he is nearly drenched in a rain of ballots. Or the magnificent ending, where he finally has understood that the words are corrupt, all the way. The minister has been re-elected, despite incriminating evidences. Verbal protests thus, are pointless. Luciano then takes one of his rewards from the minister - a set of golf-clubs - and starts with deadly seriousness and great determination to ruin another reward - his red BMW. With that he just hits himself, once more, with his own protest. Like the nameless in Beckett's How it is, he is stuck in the mud. The story can be repeated ad infinitum.
ASTRID SÖDERBERGH WIDDING