fri 29/03/2024

Vincere Special 1: Fascism is Dead, Long Live Il Duce | reviews, news & interviews

Vincere Special 1: Fascism is Dead, Long Live Il Duce

Vincere Special 1: Fascism is Dead, Long Live Il Duce

Man or monster: the humanising of Mussolini

Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.

And not without good reason: the flair of originality combined with an attention to the quality of the dialogue, the acting and the entire editing process is a skill set not often encountered these last 30 years in Italian cinema. It is often said that British filmmakers are obsessed with the past, but the present day that features in most Italian films is either so banal, or so poorly rendered that it makes you long for a dose of crinolines and antimacassars.

A pleasant surprise then, that veteran 1970s radical filmmaker Bellocchio, most of whose output has concentrated on the interface between personal psychodramas and the grittier side of contemporary politics - La Cina è Vicina (1967), Sbatti il Mostro in Prima Pagina (1972) and Il Diavolo in Corpo (1986) - should have chosen a setting filled with vintage costumes and props to draw gasps of delight from mavens of Andrew Davies and Merchant Ivory.

Not that he has completely abandoned his once fashionable take on psychiatry and treatment of mental illness. He has taken the largely unknown story of one Ida Dalser, a well-to-do boutique-owning young Milanese woman, and her love affair with the young and still politically untested Benito Mussolini, and fashioned a story which is at once sentimental and melodramatic – many Italian films by so-called arthouse directors are often scripted and acted like gloomier versions of South American telenovelas - onto which he has overlaid a detailed account of societal oppression of female erotic impulses, leading to long-term enforced hospitalisation, and consequent mental breakdown.

Although nearly 70 years have now passed since the fall of Fascism, post-war Italy has always had a great deal of difficulty in digesting that 20-year period often referred to as il Ventennio. Unlike Germany – or post-Saddam Iraq, but very like Austria and Japan - the incoming ruling class in Italy opted for a “least said, soonest mended” policy, which allowed tens of thousands of former Fascist officials of one sort or another simply to morph into good citizens of the new democratic regime. This fitted in with a culturally Catholic sense of indulgence and forgiveness (hating the sin, not the sinner), but also the expedient – some would say unprincipled – mindset of Italy’s rulers in tailoring ideology and circumstances to the national temperament.

But in recent years Mussolini has been re-emerging as a historical and largely depolicitised figure for younger Berlusconi-era Italians who have grown up with a very different kind of politics from the clunkily rhetorical “anti-Fascist” sort of the previous half-century. Fascism being a spent force, of purely anthropological interest, they are beginning to look at Mussolini as a curiosity from the past, almost like a late flowering Roman Emperor (which is of course, how the Duce saw himself). In a cultural context, the re-imagining of Mussolini in a more neutral, or at least tangential light is showing its first fruits. A subtle but sure process of humanisation of Mussolini the man is underway, which is destined to stay with us for a while.

English-language biographers are among those who have got in on the act. In line with current trends in historiography, they have tended to highlight aspects of his personality and his inner driving forces. RJB Bosworth’s Mussolini unravels new details of his past, and recasts him as a devious but very lucid innovator, whereas the wacky apologia by Spectator writer Nicholas Farrell – who lives in Mussolini’s home town Predappio, which he describes as “the fascist Bethlehem” - is a more revisionist book which would have him as a good guy, largely misunderstood.

saundersAnd although Frances Stonor Saunders clearly does not nod through Farrell’s indulgent view of the man and his foibles, her recent The Woman Who Shot Mussolini contributes nonetheless to the new trend. Stonor Saunder’s scholarly and absorbing work details with great skill the morbid obsession of the Honourable Violet Gibson, who attempted in 1926 to assassinate Mussolini. At the time, Britain still enjoyed very cordial relations with Italy’s new Fascist regime (the list of Mussolini’s admirers amongst the British Establishment was long, and very revealing), and following an extraordinary deal between the powers that were in both countries, Violet Gibson was locked inside a British mental hospital for the rest of her life.

And so to Bellocchio’s Vincere, in which Filippo Timi - the handsome, young, wild-eyed wunderkind of contemporary Italian cinema – plays a very different kind of Mussolini from the cardboard cut-out sort you might have expected from a Bertolucci a generation or so ago. The film is certainly no apologia – it contains plenty of scenes and references which flag up the innate folly of Fascism – but they are glanced at through a different lens than the one we’ve been used to.

Timi’s Duce is a lover not a fighter – and even though he treats his adoring love object, Ida Dalser (who insists that she is his first wife though she can never produce any documents to prove it), with scorn and unreconstructed male chauvinism, we are invited to consider him in terms of his emotional responses and cultural shortcomings, not merely to condemn him on account of his political crimes, as previous films about him would have us do.

The underlying structure is a strong one, and is well developed over the course of the film: namely the implicit parallel metaphor that depicts the wannabe Duce as a big masculine brute of a fellow who intends to seduce and then subjugate Italy, as though it were a silly, defenseless woman like Ida Dalser. With his canny insight into the psychology of crowds (before Elias Canetti got there), Mussolini theorised thus: “The masses love a strong man, and the masses are female in nature.”

Although the part of the film that dwells on Dalser’s courageous but ultimately futile struggle against a form of madness as defined by domineering men is clunky and repetitive – and very similar to his earlier work – Bellocchio’s attempt to grapple the narrative strictures of a standard biographical timeline (albeit with several, not very well-handled flashbacks and flashforwards) of the Anglo-American variety does reap some rewards.

Particularly gratifying is his use of period footage – mostly propaganda films and newsreels of the Fascist era - along with various scenes depicting Italian films of the time as they are projected, weaving an interesting counterpoint between the gritty reality of Italy’s social breakdown in the post-WWI period, and the fantastical dreams being evoked on the silvery screen. Perhaps the finest scene in the film – almost worth the ticket price – is the wounded Benito lying in his hospital bed, as a Giovanni Pastrone film about Jesus is projected onto a sheet above the patients, identifying his struggle and passion with that of Christ’s.

duce_vincereOne of the things that has always made Italian cinema different from any English-language cinema is the acting. If you could call it real acting at all, that is. Italian actors aim to dominate the screen through their charismatic or sexual presence, and devote precious little time to imbuing their (usually execrable) dialogue with any layers of meaning, let alone nuance. This is fine for many of the great “natural actors” of previous generations: the screen adored Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni whatever they did on set, but the attempts by contemporary Italian thespians to acquit themselves often makes for uncomfortable viewing. Fortunately, Vincere boasts in the title role one of the few current crop of male leads to hold the attention, the Umbrian-born Timi. Already something of a specialist in slightly “psycho” roles, he fills the screen with both dynamism and a certain nuance as the Young Dictator.

Although Timi just about carries the film, Vincere is redolent of so much of contemporary Italian cinema: it seems stuck in a time warp, rather than looking charmingly retro. It is melodrama, rather than drama – but hey, that’s Mussolini for you. Unfortunately the lead female role is both dull and superficial. Ida Dalser’s story - sacrificing her independence, her income and finally her sanity for a man whose child she bears (and whom she insists has married her) - is a poignant and tragic one. But as played by the much-praised Giovanna Mezzogiorno – daughter of the late lamented Seventies arthouse screen idol Vittorio Mezzogiorno – we end up almost not caring what happens to her: Like Margherita Buy, generally considered Italian cinema’s leading lady, she is pleasant enough to gaze on, but after 10 minutes listening to her trot out her lines, you are wondering what’s going on outside the cinema.

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