Il portaborse (1991)

Luciano Sandulli teaches Italian at a high school on the Amalfi Coast. He lives in an old, historically significant house that is in danger of collapse because the Ministry of Cultural Heritage has neglected it. On top of the risk of having to pay out of his own pocket for the long-overdue renovation, his budget is also burdened by his plans to have a child with Irene, a colleague who lives and teaches in Bergamo and whom he meets on weekends at a hotel halfway between them. To make ends meet, the teacher therefore writes novels and articles as a ghostwriter for Sartorio, a respected author and journalist in the midst of an artistic and existential crisis. But just when Luciano most needs the money, Sartorio abandons him. In this climate of uncertainty, Luciano and Irene’s long-distance relationship also hits a rough patch and comes close to breaking up. Cesare Botero, the Minister for State Holdings, learns from Sartorio himself about the teacher’s sideline. Having recognized Luciano’s literary talent, Botero travels to Campania with his staff to meet him and summon him to Rome to work for him. Luciano’s job will be to write speeches and public statements for the minister. Luciano accepts, and his life changes overnight: large sums of money start coming in, his house is declared a national monument and restored at the expense of the heritage authority, Irene gets a transfer to the best high school in the capital, and the politician gives him a luxury car. Although Botero’s personality fascinates him, Luciano immediately suspects that he is operating in a murky world. But, content with his new lifestyle and guided by an innate trust in institutions, he keeps working, settling for the evasive explanations he receives from the minister’s other aides, including the crude and cynical Remo Gola. In the upcoming general election, Botero is running in the Mantua constituency against the incumbent finance minister, Federico Castri. Shortly before, Castri had blocked Botero’s bill to privatize several state-owned companies, prompting Botero’s resignation and the ensuing government crisis. During the heated campaign, Luciano repeatedly crosses paths with Francesco Sanna, the director of a left-wing newspaper and a persistent critic of Botero. Luciano had already encountered Sanna’s articles in his students’ Italian essays, and had scolded them, accusing them of accepting the articles’ ideas uncritically. The professor also repeatedly notices a certain Carissimi, a harasser who follows Botero everywhere, threatening—verbally or with the help of a sign—to reveal damaging secrets about him. Meanwhile, Luciano’s doubts about the integrity of the political world around him grow. Polline, the minister’s private secretary, casually tells him that the party keeps a massive archive listing all the voters who have received favors in exchange for their votes, even though Botero had firmly denied its existence to Sanna during a televised debate. The medical director of a hospital that represents a potential pool of votes for Botero explains to Luciano how, by manipulating the combination of preferences marked on ballot papers, it is possible to identify exactly where vote-buying has taken place and how loyal voters are, thereby circumventing the secrecy of the ballot. Finally, just days before the election, Polline himself is investigated for bribes linked to the minister. When Luciano demands an explanation from his boss for all these illegal dealings—which he is in fact helping to cover up in the speeches he writes for him—the politician abruptly silences him. He throws back at Luciano all the personal benefits he has enjoyed thanks to the job, ridicules his supposed honesty as hypocritical and naïve, and, to humiliate him, refuses to intercede on behalf of Carlo Sperati, an elderly, destitute poet whom Luciano admires and befriends, so that Sperati might receive the lifetime allowance provided for under the Bacchelli Law. A few days later, Botero’s entire inner circle attends Sperati’s funeral after he dies by suicide. During the service, the minister delivers a eulogy in which, hypocritically praising the deceased, he even claims to have personally worked to secure the allowance and blames “the bureaucracy” for the fatal delay. Shaken by the loss and by what he has just heard, Luciano leaves the church and runs into Sanna and Carissimi. They invite him into their car and take him to the State Archives. There, Carissimi retrieves the ballot papers from the election ten years earlier that marked the beginning of his former friend Botero’s political rise. Carissimi had worked as a vote counter in that election, and confesses to Luciano that he altered every blank ballot or ballot without a preference vote in Botero’s favor, but Botero never rewarded him for the service. With this and other evidence Sanna has gathered over time, the professor is forced to admit—even, and especially, to himself—that ever since entering politics Botero has done nothing but pursue his own personal interests. Furious, Luciano returns to the hotel in Mantua, determined to confront the minister, but Botero’s driver knocks him back with a punch to the face. Shortly afterward, without being seen, Luciano witnesses a conversation between the politician and Sebastiano Tramonti, Luciano’s predecessor as a speechwriter and now special commissioner for the public companies in the chemical industry sector. Tramonti, an old-fashioned and fundamentally honest man, refuses to sign a document that would give Botero a powerful position in that sector through companies secretly controlled by the minister. Botero angrily threatens him and finally decides to remove him from every post. That same night, Juliette, the young interpreter for whom the professor has begun to feel a tender affection, attempts suicide after the minister fires her. Luciano then discovers that Juliette was also Botero’s lover. At the minister’s command, he actively helps rescue and hospitalize the young woman, keeping everything completely secret to avoid a scandal. The following morning, the professor resigns, personally handing the politician a caustic letter. By giving up his job, Luciano immediately loses most of the privileges he had previously obtained, including Irene’s transfer to Rome; in the meantime, she has finally become pregnant. On election night, while the votes are being counted, the professor returns one last time to Botero’s headquarters to hand back the keys to the house in Rome. By chance, he overhears Remo Gola on the phone with Marco Tullio Illica, a computer systems programmer at the prefecture’s data-processing center and a longtime party activist. Some time earlier, Illica had begged Luciano to intercede with the minister for the repatriation of his son, who was being held in Egypt for drug possession. Luciano realizes that Gola intends to use the official to rig the election again. Accompanied by Sanna, he rushes to the prefecture to report it. However, to the two men’s astonishment, Illica has not allowed himself to be bribed, and this time the election result is genuine: Botero really is winning, as is Polline, who will be able to use parliamentary immunity after his election to escape trial. Once the count is complete, Botero appears radiant on television. With his wife and son at his side, he comments on his victory, praising a political contest that was “open, fair, and democratic.” Accusing his opponents of embodying “the old politics,” he mockingly uses some of the very phrases Luciano had addressed to him in his indignant resignation letter. The professor and Sanna watch the minister’s appearance from a bar. Botero also announces that Sanna’s newspaper—which has meanwhile published the scoop about the electoral fraud ten years earlier—“has been served with a bankruptcy order and is on the way to closing its doors, forever.” Now completely disillusioned with politics and with nothing left personally to lose, Luciano at least tries to throw one last wrench into Botero’s plans. Over the phone, he reveals to one of his students sitting their final high-school exams the topics for the written Italian exam they will have to take the next day. This is the politician’s last favor in exchange for Luciano’s silence about Juliette’s attempted suicide. Luciano urges the student to spread the topics across Italy as quickly as possible so that a scandal will erupt the following morning. Immediately afterward, the professor and Sanna take golf clubs to the car the minister had given him and smash it to pieces; the golf clubs, too, had been given to Luciano by the minister at the taxpayers’ expense.