This review contains details from the life of Enzo Tortora that constitute spoilers for “Portobello.”
In 1983, Enzo Tortora was on top of the world — host of a television show watched by nearly half the population of Italy — when he suffered a fate that did not yet have a name: He was canceled.
Falsely accused by a motley crew of mobsters and other miscreants of being a drug-dealing member of the Camorra, he was jailed and convicted, hounded by the paparazzi and vivisected in the Italian newspapers. When he was acquitted on appeal in 1986, he returned to his show in triumph. But his health was broken, and he was off TV within a year and dead within two.
Today, assaulting a reputation with lies and innuendo is easily accomplished. It was not such a simple matter four decades ago, and the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio has devoted six episodes and more than six hours to dramatizing all the confounding, astounding, heartbreaking details of Tortora’s story in “Portobello,” a mini-series that premieres on Friday, on HBO Max.
The series is named after Tortora’s crowd-pleasing and influential show (which itself was named after the famous London street market), and early on we see families, a group of nuns and a clan of Camorra members gathering around bulky sets to watch; it’s the definition of appointment TV. The pull of the show is so predictable that a rival steals in to carry out a hit on one of the engrossed gangsters.
Bellocchio has fun showing us what the viewers saw: a circuslike variety show that offered a little of everything, like an all-in-one mobile app. Scouts, soldiers, opera singers, harlequins, jugglers and boogie-woogie piano players troop through the studio. Women in a glass booth take calls from people with items to sell; a matchmaker takes calls from the lonely. A hypnotist speaks soothingly into the camera, trying to mesmerize the entire country. In a signature segment, a guest tries to get the show’s resident parrot to say “Portobello.”
As ringmaster, Tortora, who was a veteran journalist and TV presenter, holds himself slightly above the fray, willing to don the occasional funny costume and to play second fiddle to a parrot but also maintaining a prideful reserve. Fabrizio Gifuni, who played the kidnapped politician Aldo Moro in Bellocchio’s previous mini-series, “Exterior Night,” invests the pre-arrest Tortora with sharp intelligence and more than a little smug complacency.
The sheer enjoyment of this section of “Portobello,” a kind of first-episode overture, is shaded by what we see happening elsewhere: A jailed, mentally unstable Camorra member, Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella, in an effectively creepy performance), is developing a resentment of Tortora’s success and popularity. An absurd convergence of events — Pandico’s decision to become a stool pigeon and a police officer’s misreading of a name in a datebook — sets in motion Tortora’s downfall.
The balance of “Portobello” is still absorbing, if more familiar. Neither a Catholic nor a Christian Democrat, Tortora is protected only by his celebrity. After he is arrested, it works against him: A succession of opportunists and grifters join in accusing him, and the case’s notoriety forces the judicial system to keep doubling down on its prosecution. Gifuni captures Tortora’s increasing sense of bewilderment and rage, which he carries into his trial, an elaborate and anarchic production that is a nightmarish, darkly hilarious analogue to his TV show.
Bellocchio’s depiction of the trial, with its cages full of defendants shouting obscene commentary, is reminiscent of scenes in his great 2019 Mafia film “The Traitor.” If you have seen the movie — one of a number of brilliant films he has made that dramatize Italian history, including “Good Morning, Night,” “Vincere” and “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara” — the corresponding scenes in “Portobello” may seem somewhat ordinary in comparison. Bellocchio’s mini-series — a format he has taken up in his 80s — do not, and perhaps cannot, match the films in intensity and sustained inventiveness.
They still operate at a high level of intelligence, seriousness and wit, however (a level you will not often come across in American TV). “Portobello” has its slow spots, but its portrait of the institutionalized chaos of Italian society is finely woven and convincing. And while Gifuni is not the most expressive of actors, the show’s portrait of Tortora — whose insistence on proclaiming his innocence makes him more of a “man of honor” than the gangsters who accuse him — is consistently compelling.
From moment to moment, Bellocchio can still surprise. He gives us a scene, shortly before Tortora’s arrest, in which the “Portobello” parrot escapes the set and flies into a nearby church, chased by the frantic production staff. Tortora spots the bird and coaxes him down; leaning in, he murmurs, “We’re safe.” It’s true only for the parrot.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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