THE old joke, that Italian film directors, irrespective of their politics, are members of the Communist Party, oddly enough never applied to Nanni Moretti whose films are irresistibly amusing, rich, complex in their construction and self-referential in a way that opens his unfailingly Marxist critique of Italian society and Italian capitalism to endless analysis.

Even when seemingly simple entertainment, Morretti’s films always cast a sharply critical eye over the complexities and contradictions of Italian life and politics. An early critic of the corrupting influence of the privately owned mass media, he is committed to a didactic and pedagogical purpose, to change people’s minds.

The opening scenes of his We Have A Pope (2011) take us around a cardinal’s conclave in the Vatican as each priest silently utters a prayer to their God: “Not me lord, not me.”

Faced with the awful reality that his fellow cardinals have chosen him, Morretti’s hero goes on the run, while — to hide this defection from cloistered authority to real life — the captain of the papal Swiss guards twitches a curtain in the pontiff’s apartment to daily assure the faithful that the Holy Father is deep in prayerful contemplation of his great responsibilities.

Meanwhile, an endless comedy brings out the ambiguities that surround the position of the Catholic religion in a society that can appear remarkably irreligious.

The protagonist in his 2006 film The Caiman, played by Morretti himself, is that contradictory figure Silvio Berlusconi. The imagery — a caiman is a form of alligator — is crudely effective, and the reference is instantly and universally recognised.

The Caiman — a film within a film — appeared at a point of political crisis with sharply contested local elections. Italy’s national broadcasting company RAI bought it but delayed showing it until years later. Right-wing politicians demanded its suppression.

Whether Berlosconi’s alliance or the so-called “centre left” were to triumph, the central proposition of the film would be confirmed. Politics was irredeemably corrupted while both the Italians depicted in film and in real life remained in two minds about the actual “caiman.”

Morretti’s politics — both sympathetic to the historical Italian Communist Party (PCI) and critical of its leadership and the abandonment of its historical mission — suffuse his films with irony and, taken as a whole, embody a partly descriptive, partly critical take on the ways in which the transformation of Italy’s political economy, its political culture and the Italian submission to the market and neoliberal economics has changed the popular consciousness.

Berlusconi was central to these degrading processes. His philandering, misogyny, money-grabbing and exhibitionism a contrived carapace that barely obscured his central political project which was consecrated in mass culture, building a new right from the ruins of the old and extirpating a left that was serious about working-class power, even when it was unsure about what that might entail.

Last week, the Italian state humiliated itself with a funeral contrived to beatify a billionaire showman politician whose life’s work was to overturn the founding principles of the 1947 liberation constitution. Pope Francis blessed “eternal peace” for Berlusconi and “consolation of heart for those who mourn his passing.”

The Tricolour no longer flies at half mast. For days the work of ministries and the two chambers of the national assembly were stilled, but now a semblance of normality is restored. A week ago Archbishop Mario Delpini officiated in Milan’s cathedral while six solemn carabinieri in full uniform escorted the coffin.

With 2,000 people, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Lega boss Matteo Salvini and dozens of state functionaries, including President Sergio Mattarella, assembled in the church and with 20,000 in the piazza, “il Cavaliere” has attended his last bunga bunga party.

For the many millions of Italians indifferent to the fate of Berlosconi’s soul, the extravagance of these ceremonies appeared in sharp contrast to the way in which the Italian state marked the deaths of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

The ancient and ailing Berlusconi, whose ascent to wealth and influence was assisted by the mafia, was thus ushered to the afterlife with the honours of state denied the investigating magistrates — servants of an ungrateful state — who died at the hands of that same mafia.

Official Italy was pointedly polite. Former Five Star Movement prime minister Giuseppe Conte described Berlusconi as “an entrepreneur and a politician who in every field has contributed to writing significant pages of our history.”

The Democratic Party’s new leader Elly Schlein offered “respect for someone who has been a protagonist in the history of our country,” while Meloni interceded with God for his immortal soul.

On the left, polite formalities were abandoned.

“Instead, we want to remember Berlusconi for what he was: an enemy of our people,” argued Potere al Popolo, the left-wing alliance. “It is not surprising that the right, the fascists, the mafiosi, the bosses, the building owners and the speculators, the tax evaders, the racists, the hypocritical bigots sanctify [him].”

The PCI made a sober estimate, describing Berlusconi as “the man who, in our country, played a historical function of unifying the different souls of the right, from those still openly neofascist to those reconverted to the vocabulary and institutional habits of the parliamentary republic, all however distinguished by their common anti-communist ruling.”

The PCI quantified his personal assets at $7.3 billion and said his “fortunes were made in contact with mafia-scented environments, with characters such as Licio Gelli, founder of the P2 Lodge, of which Berlusconi was registered,” and financiers such as Roberto Calvi.

Remember Calvi, found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge and remember the P2 lodge that connected Nato’s killer Gladio squads, mafia figures, fascist terrorists, state security officials and business leaders.

The PCI characterised him as “an entrepreneur who illegally built a close link between politics and private television communication for his own benefit, strengthened on a national scale and in perennial antagonism with the public one.”

When Sergio Cofferati, the former leader of Italy’s largest trade union federation the CGIL, was asked what “Berlusconism” was for him, he replied that Berlusconi’s “behaviours, his habits, his lifestyle had little to do with me as a person and also with the world I represented.

“Let’s say that he behaved like a rich landowner. For the working class, he could not be a role model. That model had no influence on what the union was, the trade union world.”

Potere al Popolo echoed this: “We are two different worlds. Let’s keep it in mind.”

Christian Democracy, the Vatican-backed, CIA-financed party for Italy’s clerical and propertied interests, fell apart in 1994 in the midst of the “clean hands” anti-corruption scandal which collapsed also the Italian Socialist Party for its part in Italy’s endemic corruption.

When Cardinal Camillo Ruini, papal vicar for the diocese of Rome and president of the Italian Bishop Conference, made the link with Berlusconi, “capo dei capi” of the newly contrived Forza Italia party, the Catholic Church again had a political vehicle at its disposal.

With this endorsement, Forza Italia could court that part of Christan Democracy that remained outside the compromise that the CPI made with the Catholic left. The divisions in today’s Democratic Party are the highly conflicted products of that compromise.

Of course, one pope follows another.

Berlosconi’s scandalous behaviour, most especially his involvement in prostitution with underage girls, was widely challenged — but in Pope Benedict he had a reliable shield. Since Benedict’s resignation in 2013, the church kept its distance, with the Vatican hierarchy pointedly circumspect. Pope Francis never met him, and the Vatican was officially represented at his funeral by only the papal nuncio to the Italian state.

With the boss deceased, the gang that is Forza Italia fell immediately into a struggle for office. First victory went to Marta Fascina, Berlusconi’s 33-year-old consort whose supporters now dominate the party apparatus. How permanent her ascendancy will be is up for debate.

The first issue on the agenda of the party leadership was the settling of the party budget. If Forza Italia is still something without Berlusconi it is nothing without his money and the support of his immense media empire and thus much attention is centred on the dispensations the family and his heirs will make.

Forza Italia is the third element in the ruling coalition with a much diminished Lega, headed by Salvini, the second.

In the last election, Meloni’s Fratelli di Italia cannibalised the votes of both subordinated formations to emerge as the dominant figure on a right wing that now dominates Italian politics.

The phrase which constantly occurs in reference to Berlusconi’s role is “sdoganamento.” Literally “customs clearance,” this idiomatic term summarises Berlusconi’s catalytic function in mobilising the virulent anti-communism of the Italian right for the complete “customs clearance” of fascism and the inversion of the post-war political consensus — from which a strong Italian fascism always recoiled — expressed in the anti-fascist constitution and an Italian republic based on the values of human labour.

Il Fatto Quotidiano — which describes its editorial line as “the constitution of the republic” — was founded in opposition to Berlusconi precisely “because he reduced a great democracy to a degraded sultanate.” In its commentary on the death of the “caiman,” the paper recalls 1993 when Berlusconi supported Franco Fini, then secretary of the fascist Moviemento Sociale Italiano as a candidate for mayor of Rome, and the following year put together the fascist right and the Lega Nord right with two different coalitions in the north and the south of Italy.

Berlusconi “translated into a great electoral and concrete operation of unification of the Italian right, from the nationalist and fascist ones to the secessionist and xenophobic ones to the conservative ones to the liberal ones.”

“All justified by the need to defend themselves from communism, presented as absolute evil and expanded to include any idea or behaviour that did not coincide with the anthropology personified by Berlusconi.

“Anti-communism and the customs clearance of fascism are among the major toxic waste that Berlusconi leaves behind on a political level in this world at war.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.