Film review

  • The Traitor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Il traditore

    Marco Bellocchio (2019)

    Tommaso Buscetta (1928-2000) was one of the first high-ranking members of the Sicilian Mafia to bite the Black Hand that fed him by turning informant against the organisation.  Save for a few flashbacks to earlier points in Buscetta’s life, Marco Bellocchio’s biographical drama concentrates on his last twenty years.  The Traitor starts with the protagonist’s decision to emigrate from Sicily to Brazil in 1980 – a reaction to the increasing and, in ‘Masino’ Buscetta’s view, corrupting influence on the main Palermo Mafia of a group from neighbouring Corleone.  This lengthy (153-minute) film closes with Masino’s own death from natural causes in Florida two decades later.  He lived most of that time in the US, under false identities designed to protect him from the retribution of ex-partners in crime.  His non-violent death might be considered a happy ending for Buscetta.  At one point in the story, he says that to die in his bed would be a triumph.

    The Corleonesi are an immediate reminder that Corleone was a place name first and a family name – the name of the most famous Mafia family in cinema history – second.  Like each of the Godfather films, The Traitor begins with a big social gathering.  On 4 September 1980, the feast day of Santa Rosalia, patron saint of Palermo, the Palermo and Corleone mobs hold a party to celebrate the deal they’ve struck to share the immensely lucrative local heroin trade.  Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), in his white suit and open-necked dark shirt, stands out from the other senior Mafiosi in their black tie outfits.  His pessimism about the consequences of the deal – he fears the Corleone contingent will ignore the ‘code of honour’ that has governed Palermo Mafia operations – distinguishes him too.  He decides to leave Europe with his third wife, Cristina (Maria Fernanda Cândido), and his younger children.   He reckons his two eldest sons, Benedetto (Gabriele Cicirello) and Antonio (Paride Cicirello), are old enough to make up their own minds, and they stay in Sicily.  Their father trusts his longstanding Mafia colleague Pippo Calò (Fabrizio Ferracane) to take care of Benedetto and Antonio.  Masino’s pessimism is vindicated, his trust in Calò misplaced.

    The saint’s day party concludes with a group photograph.  Bellocchio follows this with a series of close-ups of several men in the photo, naming each one, before cutting to Buscetta’s life in Brazil, in 1984.  The description of his life there is interspersed with the serial execution of people shown in the earlier close-ups, culminating in Benedetto and Antonio.  The Corleone Mafia, led by Totò Riina (Nicola Calì), is responsible for these killings.  The narrative moves too quickly to explain why these individuals were murdered – in a short interview in Sight & Sound (September 2020), says that Riina’s men simply ‘eliminate whatever gets in their way’.  The screen makes quite clear, though, the numbers of killings carried out by the new power structure.  A running total appears in the bottom left-hand side of the frame:  the figure ticks quickly upwards, pausing a few moments to record the death of each of the featured party guests before resuming its swift climb.

    This is a flashily effective device and the montage of killings by the Riina gang similarly slick.  Even if Bellocchio is using these things as a sardonic comment on Mafia movie tropes, it’s hard for the viewer to see them as anything more than such standard practice.   The same goes for the episode follows Buscetta’s arrest by the Brazilian authorities, who torture him in an attempt to get information about his own and others’ crimes.  In one sequence, he’s forced to watch as his terrified wife is held outside an airborne helicopter with only her captors’ grip preventing her plummeting to earth.  The tone and tempo of The Traitor change dramatically after Buscetta’s extradition to Rome, in his interviews with the renowned anti-Mafia campaigning judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi).

    Bellocchio (who wrote the screenplay with Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi, Francesco Piccolo and Francesco La Licata) would have done well to include more scenes involving Falcone, who, in his dealings with Buscetta, is unsmiling, deeply angry, businesslike and humane.  We see each man surprised to be favourably impressed by the other.  Even so, there must have been a distance travelled between the flickers of respect that Buscetta shows Falcone and the 487-page confession he made to the judge, which brought the Sicilian Mafia to its knees.  We don’t see enough of this journey.

    Instead, Bellocchio is impatient to move on to the trials, in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, at which Buscetta was the star prosecution witness.  His testimony is regularly interrupted by the men he’s accusing, who yell threats and insults or resort to more drastically disruptive tactics (one strips naked, inviting the court to take a good look).  Even when these men, including Calò, have been imprisoned, they reappear at a subsequent trial, noisily joining in from inside their cages at the back of the court.  Occupying a substantial amount of screen time, the trial set pieces must have taken some staging but they’re not imaginative and some elements don’t ring true.  If it’s par for the course for defendants or convicted criminals to do their best to derail proceedings, how come the ineffectual presiding judge is apparently astonished by such bad behaviour?

    Bellocchio tends to be overemphatic.  Once Buscetta, Cristina and the younger children are settled in the US, there’s a promising opportunity to show how they can never feel safe there.  A wary exchange of looks between Masino and another man in a supermarket works well enough; a longer sequence, when the family go to an outdoor restaurant and the house musician starts singing in Sicilian to let the exile know he’s been rumbled, is more obvious (and it seems unlikely that Buscetta would choose a venue where he was so publicly on display).  When another state witness admits in court that he and Calò murdered Benedetto and Antonio, their father’s unusually emotional reaction is powerful but Bellocchio spoils the effect by showing (again – this time in more gruesome detail) how Buscetta’s sons died.

    Nicola Piovani has composed a fine score, evocative of Nino Rota’s Godfather music but sufficiently individual too.  And there are good bits in The Traitor – for example, a startling montage of celebrations in bars and jails, as news breaks of Falcone’s assassination by the Mafia.  For the most part, though, it’s less intense, incidental moments in the film that are the most engaging – like Masino’s singing ‘Historia de un amor‘ to an audience of family and friends at his birthday party,  the choice of song resonant because Bellocchio has used it earlier in a different context.  Some of the more colourful details are humorous too.  Buscetta yells at his Brazilian captors for pronouncing his name wrong (as bruschetta minus the ‘r’).  After the mayhem and torture we’ve been watching (including Cristina’s helicopter outing), the flight attendants’ safety drill demo on Buscetta’s plane back from Brazil to Rome seems laughable.  As he chats with fellow ‘traitor’ Totuccio Contorno (Luigi Lo Cascio) in their custodial sanctuary, Buscetta carefully applies black dye to disguise his greying hair.

    Giulio Andreotti (Giuseppe di Marca) makes two brief, effectively contrasting appearances.  In the first, he’s trouserless in a men’s outfitter’s.  Buscetta, in the same place at the same time, has to ask his minder if this spindly senior citizen really is Andreotti.  Their second encounter is in a courtroom, where Andreotti is on trial for alleged Mafia associations and Buscetta giving evidence against him.  The defendant still looks like a funny old man but you see his sharp brain working as he takes notes of what Buscetta is saying.

    Pierfrancesco Favino gives a good performance in the lead but, in spite of appearing in nearly every scene, isn’t given much scope to penetrate his character’s surface.  Defectors like Buscetta are known in Italy as pentiti – the ‘repented’.  Marco Bellocchio claims in S&S that his film raises questions like, ‘Can a man truly and profoundly change in the course of his life or is it just a pretence?  Is change a way of healing, of repenting?’, and more.   I couldn’t see that these questions were explored much in The Traitor.  At the start of his conversations with Falcone, Buscetta asserts there’s no such thing as the Mafia, which he dismisses as a media invention.  He says his allegiance is, rather, to Cosa Nostra.  He talks wistfully about the values that once underpinned the organisation to which he had devoted his life – looking out for needy paisans, and so on.  It’s incredible that everything went bad thanks solely to the Corleone clan around 1980.  That Buscetta and others became pentiti was self-evidently a good thing but the lack of depth to the film’s portrait of its protagonist makes it hard to avoid reacting as Falcone does, when he derides Buscetta’s hypocritical nostalgia.

    The closing scenes are among The Traitor‘s most dramatically effective.  Buscetta, who has terminal cancer, takes the night air, sitting outside his home in Florida, armed with the gun he still always carries.  In one of his interviews with Falcone he described his first assignment for the Palermo Mafia.  Buscetta was charged with killing a man who was attending the christening of his baby son.  Outside the church, when he catches sight of Buscetta (in his twenties, played by Giovanni Crozza), the man thinks and acts quickly.  He takes his son from his wife and holds him close.  The code of conduct to which Buscetta subscribes prevents him from firing while the prospective victim is holding his child.  Buscetta tells Falcone that the man continued to use his son as a bodyguard throughout the years ahead, taking care never to be seen in public without the boy.  Easier said than done, you feel, but never mind.  This is much as we see him reveal to Falcone but the killing is clearly a piece of unfinished business not just for Buscetta but for Bellocchio too.

    As Buscetta starts to doze in his chair on the Florida porch, his mind returns to the wedding day of the marked man’s son; when the groom left with his bride, he also left his father exposed.   Cristina Buscetta comes out onto the porch to check on her husband, who’s now unconscious.  She quietly removes the rifle from his grasp:  he won’t need it any more.  The last thing in Buscetta’s mind before he dies is the memory of killing the man at long last deprived of his filial shield.

    10 August 2020

  • Make Up

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claire Oakley (2019)

    First time back in a cinema since mid-March this year, I watched Make Up, writer-director Claire Oakley’s debut feature, at the Curzon Richmond.  Social distancing wasn’t a problem.  There were only six other people in the audience …

    That seemed apt enough for a film set in an out-of-season seaside resort, an inherently promising setting for a psychological thriller or mystery.  It allows a storyteller to suggest that a place like this must be empty in order for its disturbing essential character, concealed when tourist dwellings and amusement arcades are full of people and noise, to emerge.  Oakley sets the action in Cornwall, in a windswept, nearly deserted holiday park close to the seashore.  Eighteen-year-old Ruth (Molly Windsor) comes to stay with her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), who regularly works at the park during low season, helping with the annual winter clean-up and redecoration of static caravans.  There are sights and sounds to unsettle Ruth as soon as she arrives, one dark afternoon or evening.  While she and Tom are making love that night, she’s disturbed by a noise from outside that she’s never heard before:  Tom explains it’s foxes barking.  It’s not long before Ruth suspects that her boyfriend of three years has been cheating on her.  She notices a smudge of lipstick on a mirror, a long red hair on one of Tom’s T-shirts.

    As well as doing odd jobs, Tom enjoys surfing but Ruth won’t be joining him in that.  She can’t swim, has never even paddled in the sea before.  The site manager Shirley (Lisa Palfrey), who agrees to give Ruth a temporary cleaning job, tells her the sea is ‘a great healer’.  It rid Shirley of her fear of dogs – just as well, in view of the threatening Alsatian resident at the park with his Dolge Orlick-ish owner Kai (Theo Barklem-Biggs), who works with Tom.  Another member of the small work force is the relatively very glamorous Jade (Stefanie Martini), whose hobby is make-up and hairstyling.  When she offers to give wan Ruth a makeover, Tom warns his girlfriend to be careful:  Jade ‘has a reputation’.  Ruth, meanwhile, continues to be unnerved – by Kai’s sexist foul language, by a lipstick kiss-shape, just like the one on Tom’s mirror, which appears on the windows of caravans that have been fumigated and sealed up for the winter.  She also sees a young woman in one of these caravans and tells Shirley, who assures Ruth she can’t have.  Despite her total lack of saltwater experience, Ruth is also oddly keen on venturing into the sea, which figures prominently in her dreams and nightmares too.

    With the help of her DP Nick Cooke and sound designer Anya Przygoda, Claire Oakley certainly succeeds in creating ominous atmosphere.  The carefully composed visual and sonic effects, which tend to upstage the characters, raise early suspicions that Make Up is primarily a stylistic exercise but Oakley makes you curious how she’ll resolve the puzzling goings-on:  is Ruth experiencing the paranormal or paranoia?  About halfway through this quite short (86-minute) film, you start to realise it’s neither.  This will be the story of Ruth’s sexual awakening, her discovery that she’s in love not with Tom but with Jade.  Oakley’s strategy depends crucially on making Ruth a blank canvas in terms of both backstory and Molly Windsor’s playing of her (good actress as Windsor may well be).  At one point, Tom tells his glum-looking girlfriend he’s sorry if the place isn’t what she expected it to be.  Ruth replies, in her usual toneless voice, that she didn’t expect it to be anything (or words to that effect).   This is only too easy to believe.

    Ruth, whose first boyfriend Tom is, seems never to have had an inkling of her true sexuality.  It’s clear too that she’s never seen a film featuring a stereotyped lesbian character.  If she had, she’d have realised immediately, thanks to Stefanie Martini’s telegraphic acting, what’s in Jade’s mind.  Ruth does get the message when she goes to Jade’s caravan for a drink one evening; she leaves hurriedly because she fears Jade is making a pass at her.  (Ruth goes out into pouring rain and a howling gale, the weather outside the caravan matching the emotional turbulence going on inside.)   After one of her sessions in the sea Ruth takes a shower and hears sounds of passionate lovemaking in one of the adjacent stalls.  Oakley quickly cuts from this to Ruth’s return to her and Tom’s caravan but you get a distinct sense that the narrative will return to the showers, to describe further what Ruth witnessed there.  And so it does:  Ruth gets down on all fours to spy, under the partition between cubicles, on two writhing, naked female bodies.

    It’s no surprise either that Oakley chooses to show this at the point at which it’s time for Ruth to accept her true sexual nature.  In the closing scenes, Tom angrily gets the message and their relationship appears to end.  Ruth goes to Jade’s empty caravan and puts on the fur jacket hanging there, along with a long, red-haired wig and face make-up.  She leaves the caravan and wanders into an after-dark beach party, where a huge bonfire blazes.  There she meets Jade, who is entranced by Ruth’s cosmetic transformation.  The following morning, in the film’s closing shot, Ruth steps confidently, smilingly (thank goodness) into the sea.  As Shirley cured her cynophobia in the briny so has Ruth conquered her fear-of-who-she-really-is.

    Claire Oakley’s use of the sea, the winter season and spooky psychodrama tropes as a means of exploring the upheaval of surprising sexuality might have seemed inventive if Make Up had been made a decade or more ago.  As a film of today, it left me thinking:  is that all?  The turn that Oakley’s story takes seems thoroughly conventional now – as do reviewers’ reactions to it (100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes so far).  The new(ish) critical orthodoxy extends to the reception of the main male character, even if Oakley may not mean to be so unkind to Tom and even though Joseph Quinn plays him well.  In her review (‘…a thrillingly queer tangle in a Cornish campsite’) on the BFI website, Rebecca Harrison includes among the indignities to which Ruth is subjected ‘watching Tom eat spaghetti sandwiches with grotesque abandon’.  A few years ago a remark like that in a film review might have been condemned (and reasonably so) as a deplorably snotty comment on the character’s social background and tastes.  This aspect of Tom is nowadays overridden by the fact that he’s a young man who has sex with his girlfriend also ‘with grotesque abandon’ – without noticing, let alone caring, that she’s not enjoying it.

    6 August 2020

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