Gorbaciof

Venice (Out of Competition) – Italian acting superstar Toni Servillo plays the quirk-laden title character, trying his darnedest to keep from going under in desperate circumstances. Paul Martin takes in a pedestrian tale rescued by a compelling lead performance.

It was if the audience gathered in Venice's Sala Grande theatre knew what lay ahead. All present and correct for the premiere of Italian drama Gorbaciof, they were generous with their applause as both the on and off screen personnel from the movie took their places in the auditorium. Actually, too generous if truth be told; big hands being granted to the vacant seats reserved for a couple of actors still busy siphoning their respective pythons. But while the clapping was enthusiastic for all, nothing compared to the oceanic roar of approval that greeted Toni Servillo, a welcome of the kind of noise and intensity you would more readily associate with last-minute cup final-winning goals.

Now you could interpret this rapturous acclaim as evidence of Servillo's popularity in his native Italy, he having firmly established himself as one of that nation's finest acting talents, courtesy of his stellar turns in the international hits, ll Divo and Gomorrah. Or, if you were in more of an interstellar overdrive kind of a mood, then you could view it as providential praise for a dazzling showing as the eponymous figure in the film the audience were about to see; his turn in Gorbaciof being of sufficient interest as to go some way towards covering up the other deficiencies in Stefano Incerti's film.

Appearing in nearly every scene of this almost dialogue-free movie, the first thing to strike you about Gorbaciof is his incongruous appearance. We meet him strutting down the street, en-route to his job as a prison teller, looking like the seedy uncle of Saturday Night Fever's Tony Manero, decked out in a cheap-looking grey checked suit and maroon polo shirt, jet black hair crowned by a bald pate, and that mark on his forehead from which his ex-Soviet premier-referencing nickname derives. While his occupation may be in the grey walls of the prison, it soon becomes apparent that gambling is what really stokes the fires within Gorbaciof. Bingo, slot machines, an old-fashioned visit to the bookies – if you can wager a few euros on it, then Gorby is game.

This monocular view of life undergoes amendment during a backroom game of poker at a Chinese restaurant, where he meets waitress Lila (played by Mi Yang). Convinced that her father, a perennial loser at the card table, is intending to force her into prostitution to ease his own money woes, Gorbaciof suddenly envisages a new life for himself, as protector of this young beauty. Having become involved with Lila though, his own luck begins to run out, with rumours flying round the prison tagging him as a thief, and chronic gambling losses forcing him to accept violent criminal assignments.

With words at a premium throughout, Servillo crafts the character almost entirely through his physical performance. Gorbaciof may be an iconoclastic loner, yet this does not designate him as a shrinking violet, as we learn in an early scene where he mocks a truculent teenager on a train, infuriating the kid into lunging for him. Similarly when he catches a couple of cocky youths giving a hard time to his beloved Lila, he wastes no time in giving his knuckles and toecaps a workout. There is a softer side to him too, as we see during his time spent in Lila's company; his normally stoic face contorting into a look of clownish glee in one scene where he pushes her round on an airport luggage trolley. Somehow Servillo manages to marshal all the incongruities into a complete believable whole, his Gorbaciof making for an oddly charismatic, if not exactly likeable, central protagonist.

A pity then that the story is less than arresting. There is some interest to be gleaned from the cynical portrayal of exploitative authority figures (both of Gorbaciof's primary tormentors are ostensible instruments of justice; a lawyer and a policeman), while Incerti delivers a few nice touches, such as when the frenetic sound of the aliens closing in on at the bottom of the screen at the conclusion of a game of Space Invaders provides aural metaphor for the main character's predicament after he suffers a blow-out at the bookies. But the tale of a noose gradually tightening round the throat of a middle-aged sad sack as he pursues an impossible dream is about as fresh as a gibbon's rectum, and the film's ending – which will spark feelings of deja vu for fans of Pulp Fiction – is as cheap as Gorbaciof's never-changing outift, functioning as it does like an infuriating deus ex machina.

Rating on a scale of 5 dancing partners for Zangief: 2

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Stefano Incerti
Screenplay by: Diego De Silva, Stefano Incerti
Cast: Toni Servillo, Mi Yang, Geppi Glejeses, Nello Mascia
Cert: TBC
Running Time: 87 minutes

More on IndieMovies:
Read the latest movie news and movie reviews. Keep up-to-date with the latest from the Venice Film Festival 2010. Watch free movies on the site now.