Marco Bellocchio, the tireless warhorse of Italian cinema, kicks up a swirling dust cloud of corruption with this fabulous, stranger-than-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Shot for the streaming service HBO Max, it is the director’s second historical miniseries after 2022’s Exterior Night, about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and features the same lead player in Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has surely cornered the market in playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas typically inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The ground is liable to drop away pretty much at any moment.
Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, a primetime TV presenter in the twinkling Terry Wogan mould who hosts a Friday night entertainment show on a soundstage made up to resemble an old-style small-town market. Portobello features dances and phone-ins and stars a parrot called Ramon, who point-blank refuses to speak. The show pulls in a peak audience of about 28 million, which means it’s watched by everyone, in all social classes, from the sisters at the convent to the cons inside Naples’ Poggioreale prison. One of these prisoners is such a fan of Portobello, in fact, that he posts Tortora a set of knitted lace doilies to be auctioned at his market. Naturally the inmate wants a namecheck on the show – or failing that, a letter of thanks. So he writes to Tortora again, and this time he’s more peeved.
