Nanni Moretti's deceptively playful The Caiman became an instant box-office hit in Italy last year when it was released two weeks before the elections that ousted Silvio Berlusconi. Its delicious conceit is that a downand-out B-movie producer (Silvio Orlando), trying to keep creditors at bay, commits to filming a script he hasn't read, which turns out to be a political thriller lampooning Berlusconi ("I even voted for him, " he exclaims on finding out, too late).

Moretti himself plays an actor who initially turns down the filmwithin-a-film role, saying, "We know everything about Berlusconi already, this film will just tell left-wing audiences what they want to hear."

The Caiman (the word means 'predator') works on several levels at the same time. It has all the slapstick charm of a 1970s Divorce Italian-style romantic comedy. The pathetically inept and apolitical Bruno (marvellously captured by sadfaced Orlando) struggles to hold a cast and crew together . . .

without any money to pay them . . .

while also trying to prevent his wife (Margherita Buy) walking out on him and their two children. To add to his woes he belatedly learns that Teresa (Jasmine Trinca), the captivating young woman who wrote the film and persuaded him to let her direct it, is a lesbian mother.

Typical of the man, his liking for her as a person overcomes his kneejerk prejudice against her sexual nature. We're beguiled by his hilarious helplessness and his despairing devotion not just to his failed family but to cinema: a latter-day Ed Wood, he lives and sleeps in his now unused studios.

Counter-pointing this bittersweet comedy are the growing political implications of the film he is making. It is now reduced by budgetary constraints to one day in the life of Berlusconi ("a man who entered politics because otherwise he'd go to jail") but, helped by portentous music, begins to assume some of the tone of the great Italian paranoia thrillers of the 1970s, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and Rosi's The Mattei Affair in particular.

Berlusconi is first portrayed building up his media empire with the help of bribes from a mysterious slush fund, then as prime minister by Michele Placido . . . who sends up his own image as one of Italy's leading male stars . . . and finally, along with clips of newsreel footage, played by Moretti, speaking transcripts of Berlusconi's own fascist words as he exploits of his media monopoly to rant against the state and the judiciary. The make-believe movie and the actual movie merge into one as a caution, as Teresa says, on "how a guy like this has paralysed Italy with his personal problems".

The Caiman is a tragic-comic farce that loses none of its relevance despite the fact that Berlusconi is no longer in government. He still owns three private TV channels and continues to defy the courts. His contempt for democracy has echoes in Spain where the USleaning right-wing opposition Partido Popular is rabble-rousing in the streets, castigating the judiciary and calling for the boycott of the independent El Pais newspaper. As always with Moretti, The Caiman is a quirkily personal and endearing movie, but with the riveting perception of the little boy who called out that the emperor had no clothes.