The Oscar-winning director will follow HBO show The Young Pope with Loro, about the former Italian prime minister and his inner circle

Paolo Sorrentino, who won an Academy Award for The Great Beauty and whose work has often focused on the loneliness of ageing playboys with enormous power, is to make a film about Silvio Berlusconi.

According to Variety, the director is currently working on a screenplay for Loro, which they speculate may shoot as early as summer 2017. Loro translates as “them”, but it also sounds in Italian like “l’oro”, which means gold.

The film will be in Italian; Sorrentino’s most recent big screen outing, last year’s Youth, was his second in English and, like This Must Be the Place (2011), less well-received than efforts in his native tongue.

However, The Young Pope, his 10-part series for HBO starring Jude Law as an American pontiff, is also in English. The first two episodes of that programme premiered at the Venice film festival last week, to an ecstatic reception.

Sorrentino’s most pointed previous portrayal of a high-ranking politician was 2008’s Il Divo, whose subject was Giulio Andreotti, perhaps the most prominent post-war statesman in the country, who served as prime minister seven times. That film starred Toni Servillo; also the lead in 2004’s The Consequences of Love, 2007’s Gomorrah and of The Great Beauty. No casting has yet been announced for Loro, but Servillo would be the natural frontrunner.

Berlusconi turns 80 next month and is expected to soon retire from the political arena after a volatile career. Last month, he announced his intention to sell all shares in AC Milan, the football club he has owned for 30 years. He was the subject of Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman (2006), in which a B-movie director makes a satire about the leader.

Variety reports that Sorrentino’s “is expected to be a depiction of Berlusconi’s world, but not a scathing sterile criticism”.