Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Youth) skewers Italian politics with this ambitious, sexually explicit, no-holds-barred satire of the life and misfortunes of the corrupt, scandal-ridden four-term Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his inner circle.

Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio) is a handsome young guy-on-the-make whose ambition is to leave his provincial southern city for Rome and get close to Silvio Berlusconi (portrayed masterfully by Toni Servillo). His means of doing so are scandalous to say the least but highly effective. Berlusconi himself, meanwhile, is being taken to task by his long-suffering, (soon to be ex-) wife, Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci), a woman of cool self-possession, and abandoned by his political allies, the fallen PM is left to fumble with the private realities behind his public scandals.

A cynical, sharp-eyed portrayal of power and how to obtain it, this state-of-the-nation epic doesn’t glamorise the corruption and (pervasive) nudity, but neither does it judge it. Falling somewhere between farce and tenderness, as Sorrentino himself has put it, “Loro is neither pro- or anti-Berlusconi. It is instead a tender look at the weaknesses of an old man.”

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