Film review

  • The Great Ambition

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Berlinguer. La grande ambizione

    Andrea Segre (2024)

    An epigraph to this screen biography of the Italian politician Enrico Berlinguer (1922-84) confirms that it takes its title from words of Antonio Gramsci:  ‘Usually we see the struggle of small ambitions … against great ambition, which is inseparable from the collective good’.  (I suspect something has been lost in translation there … )  In the 1970s, Berlinguer brought the Italian Communist Party (PCI) closer to government than any PCI leader before or since.  Andrea Segre’s film, which begins in 1973, works its way through a series of major political events and Berlinguer’s involvement in them, including the 1974 Italian referendum on divorce, intervening general elections and the Red Brigade’s kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978.  Segre works into the narrative an impressive collection of news archive footage and Elio Germano gives a fine performance as Berlinguer but The Great Ambition is very limited, sometimes inert, as drama.

    Introducing his film at BFI, Andrea Segre offered a commercial justification for the way in which he chose to tell Berlinguer’s story: after opening last year’s Rome Film Festival (where Elio Germano won the Best Actor prize), The Great Ambition has fared well at the Italian box office, with encouraging numbers of younger viewers buying tickets.  Although Segre sees this as evidence that his historical film, as he intended, ‘speaks to’ the very different political world of the 2020s, I’m not sure it does, beyond occasionally illustrating that difference – as when, say, Berlinguer deplores rampant consumerism and politicians treating the electorate as idiots.  Politically far-sighted as he may have been, it’s doubtful that Berlinguer could have predicted how much worse things would get in those two respects over the next half-century.

    The film starts in 1973 for two main reasons. That year saw Berlinguer, as General Secretary of the PCI, launch his proposal for a ‘democratic alliance’ between his party and Italian Christian Democrats – or, at least, the strand of Christian Democracy represented by Aldo Moro.  The proposal reflected Berlinguer’s pragmatism in conjunction with his fundamental ambition to see a democratically-elected socialist government in Italy.  His chief inspiration in believing that ambition realistic was Salvador Allende, whose left-wing coalition, Unidad Popular, was voted in and governed Chile until Augusto Pinochet seized power in the military coup of September 1973.  (The Great Ambition opens with footage of the coup in Chile.)  Segre introduces Berlinguer during a visit that same autumn to Communist Bulgaria, where the country’s president, Todor Zhivkov (Svetoslav Dobrev), sharply takes issue with what he sees as Allende’s and Berlinguer’s compromise politics.  The Bulgarian episode is a prelude to Berlinguer’s 1974 visit to the Soviet Union; his meeting with Leonid Brezhnev (Nikolay Danchev); and the chilly reception of his speech to the annual party congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow.  In contrast, Berlinguer enjoys growing popularity at home and elsewhere in Western Europe.  The PCI’s increasing vote share in Italian parliamentary elections brings the party to the verge of government, or a stake in government, in the general election of 1976 and its aftermath.

    The Great Ambition, with a screenplay by Segre and Marco Pettenello, is very different from traditional biopics about politicians, where formative moments in the protagonist’s youth, key political and family relationships, and neatly dramatisable career highs and lows, tend to hold sway.  Yet the political detail supplied here doesn’t cut deeper than those biopic tropes.  Even though Elio Germano delivers Berlinguer’s speeches convincingly, it’s hard to see why Segre goes to the trouble of staging, for example, the Moscow congress and the delegates sitting on their hands, when he also includes an Italian TV news report of what has happened at the congress.  Information given about the political dramatis personae is oddly inconsistent.  In behind-closed-doors PCI meetings, Segre will sometimes put on the screen someone’s name without indicating their party position, thus seeming to assume a fair knowledge of Italian political history on the viewer’s part; several of these politicians appear just the once. Yet the party roles of Moro and Giulio Andreotti are explained in more detail – even though they’re surely the two most familiar names to audiences within and beyond Italy, and both men will make repeated appearances in the film.

    Thanks to the visual texture of DP Benoît Dervaux’s images, the transition from news film to dramatised narrative is often nearly seamless. Yet the prevailing quasi-documentary style also means that some of Segre’s more conventional staging – of election night results coming in thick and fast, of reactions to the news of Moro’s abduction – stick out as routinely theatrical.  Attenuated coverage of the hero’s home life pays some dividends.  Germano conveys with great economy, but nonetheless strongly, Berlinguer’s love for his wife Letizia (Elena Radonicich) and the couple’s four children (only Alice Airoldi, as the eldest of the three daughters, is credited on Wikipedia or IMDb).  The personal domestic details are refreshing and enjoyable partly because they’re rather few.  When the youngest daughter does a childish drawing of her father, she says it’s a picture of ‘a grey functionary’ – words she’s presumably heard describing him on the radio or TV.   Early on, Berlinguer tells Letizia that he put a fifty-thousand (?) lire note, for safe keeping, in one of their library’s many books; unfortunately, he can’t remember which book.  Much later on, a political debate with his two eldest children brings up the name of Rosa Luxemburg; Berlinguer remembers that he put the note – naturally enough – between pages of The Accumulation of Capital.

    We’re left wanting to know much more about Enrico Berlinguer, though.  Lean-and-hungry-looking Elio Germano does a great job of limning the man’s political strength of purpose and intelligence but Segre prefers showing behaviour to exploring character.  There’s a nice scene in which Berlinguer, in conversation with his eldest daughter, recalls – with feeling but without sentimentality – his mother’s death when he was a young teenager.  More typically, though, the film’s Berlinguer drinks milk, does gentle exercises and chain smokes:  the effect is tantalising – and frustrating because it’s clear the lead actor has the skill and invention to go further.  In the supporting cast, Roberto Citran stands out as the smoothly conciliatory Moro.  Paolo Pierobon, though more obvious as Andreotti, is entertaining (especially when, on a coffee-time visit to PCI offices to propose a political deal, Andreotti asks if he can take away the little sugar packets – it seems he collects these).

    A film-maker can’t easily predict what their audience – especially an international audience – will or won’t know about the film’s subject, historical or otherwise.  In this particular case, I must shamefully confess that I had a better advance knowledge of the divorce referendum than of contemporary elections in Italy because I remembered that Italian TV didn’t screen the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which took place during the referendum campaign:  it was feared the Italian entry, ‘Sì’, could be construed as propaganda for the (successful) ‘Yes’ campaign.  (Sung by Gigliola Cinquetti, who’d won Eurovision a decade earlier, ‘Sì’ finished second to ‘Waterloo’, by the way.)  Even so, Andrea Segre’s approach to the life and times of Enrico Berlinguer comes across as both self-limiting and confused.  BFI was screening The Great Ambition as the climax to its five-day ‘Cinema Made in Italy’ programme (a pity the film’s running time was advertised so inaccurately – as 95 minutes, when it’s actually 123).  The curator, Adrian Wootton, explained, to a nearly full NFT1, that the programme was designed to showcase Italian films which hadn’t yet received a wide international release.  That’s a worthy principle but I left feeling it’s hardly surprising that this film hasn’t yet seen the light of day in other British cinemas.

    16 March 2025

  • So Long at the Fair

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough (1950)

    So Long at the Fair – like its close contemporary, Robert Hamer’s The Spider and the Fly (1949) – is a rather intriguing British film set in France.  Although the screenplay, by Hugh Mills and Anthony Thorne, is adapted from the latter’s 1947 novel of the same name, the plot derives from an urban legend of the late nineteenth century – one that inspired several stories and dramas in the course of the next few decades.  According to the legend, says Wikipedia, ‘during an international exposition in Paris, a daughter who returned after leaving her mother in a hotel room found the woman gone, and the hotel staff professed to have no knowledge of the missing woman’.  In So Long at the Fair, an English brother and sister, Johnny and Vicky Barton, arrive for the 1889 Paris Exposition.  The day after their arrival, Johnny and the room in which he was staying at the Hotel de Licorne – room 19 – are nowhere to be seen.  But the vanishing room, although it’s the central mystery, isn’t the only unexpected or puzzling element of Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough’s film.

    At the start, So Long at the Fair looks all set to be constrained by the limits of what normally happens in the sort of picture it appears to be.  Horse-drawn carriages move through the Paris streets to the accompaniment of Benjamin Frankel’s agreeable, unsurprising score (complete with, for these equine shots, a musical clip-clop).  The Bartons’ early scenes make clear that genial, mildly pompous Johnny (David Tomlinson) considers himself a man of the world; he treats his impetuous younger sister (Jean Simmons) – who’s excited by the prospect of seeing the Paris sights, especially the new Eiffel Tower – with condescending indulgence.  In the hotel entrance, Vicky bumps into a young man (Dirk Bogarde):  an instant mutual attraction is clear in the looks they exchange.  The young man – an English artist called George Hathaway, trying to make his name in Paris as any soi-disant artist should – appears again that evening.  He’s in the company of an older and a younger woman when he stops to speak to the Bartons at their table in a Montmartre restaurant.  You could say it’s easy for this film to take the viewer by surprise simply because it seems so obvious what’s coming next.  Yet it’s not only the turn of events but also the manner of the surprises that confounds expectations.

    The first surprise comes when Vicky pleads to go on to the Moulin Rouge after dinner:  Johnny says he’s too tired for that, after a day of travelling, and that’s just how he seems.  Screen people sickening for something serious (as Johnny very much is) tend to cough repeatedly or rain sweat, certainly in films of this vintage.  There’s a slight strain in David Tomlinson’s face and his voice has lost the smug bounce it had at the start; but no more than that.  You wouldn’t anticipate this particular actor being so subtle, especially when Tomlinson has such limited screen time.  Johnny will soon disappear from the film, though not before relenting:  he and his sister do visit the Moulin Rouge – so that the audience, as well as Vicky, can briefly enjoy watching can-can dancers.  Next morning Vicky looks out euphorically on the sunlit city, dominated by the Eiffel Tower, before heading for her brother’s room.  Its disappearance isn’t announced by a resounding chord or by instant high emotion on Vicky’s part but by a rearview shot of Jean Simmons, standing frozen to the spot – a less than obvious and powerful way of delivering this pivotal moment in the story.

    There follows an exasperating exchange with the hotel owner, Madame Hervé (a forceful Cathleen Nesbitt), and her brother, Narcisse (Marcel Poncin):  both insist the Licorne has no room 19 and that Mlle Barton arrived alone the previous day, as the hotel register appears to confirm.  Desperate but resourceful, Vicky makes her way to the British Consulate and, undeterred by the fussy official (Michael Ward) who tells her the place is now closed because the Consul is leaving for a formal procession to the Exposition, forces her way in.  The Consul (Felix Aylmer), remarkably avuncular and sympathetic, suggests that Vicky find as a witness Nina (Zena Marshall), the friendly hotel chambermaid who greeted the Bartons the previous day.  When Vicky recalls that Nina was eagerly anticipating a ride with her boyfriend in a hot air balloon at the Exposition, the Consul even gives Vicky a lift there, in his carriage.  She alights just in time to catch sight of Nina before the balloon takes flight.  In So Long at the Fair‘s most startling moment of all, the balloon bursts into flames and plummets to the ground to the horror of the watching crowd.  This is quite realistically staged and again punctures the film’s predictability.  Although what happens to the balloon is a dreadful accident, Jean Simmons strongly conveys Vicky’s distraught conviction that people and things are malignly conspiring against her.

    So Long at the Fair sometimes baffles through what just seems carelessness.  Madame Hervé first tells Vicky there’s no room 19, then says room 19 is the bathroom on Vicky’s floor:  the bathroom on the first floor does indeed now have number 19 on the door, whereas the bathroom on the floor above, as Vicky and we later discover, has a numberless salle de bain sign:  why didn’t crafty Madame Hervé who, it turns out, wants to remove all evidence of room 19, put up the same bathroom sign on the first floor?  Shortly after the Bartons arrive at the Licorne, its owner is chiding workmen redecorating the hotel for their slow progress – an exchange that serves no purpose except to make the overnight programme of works to disappear Johnny’s room all the more incomprehensible.  It turns out that Johnny became seriously ill during the night and a doctor diagnosed – on the spot – bubonic plague.  Although it’s not implied there’d been any other local cases, Madame Hervé and Narcisse, alarmed by the implications for Exposition tourist trade if the news got out, arranged a high-speed and inaudible refurb – literally a cover-up operation.  Johnny meanwhile was whisked away to a small hospital, run by nuns, outside central Paris.

    Although the script puts xenophobic remarks in the mouths of characters we’re meant to find humorously outrageous, the film evidently shares their views of foreigners.  George’s companions are a young woman, Rhoda O’Donovan (nicely played by Honor Blackman), and her snobbish, plain-speaking mother (Betty Warren), who has disparaging things to say about the French.  While the plague rumours element is part of  the vanishing hotel room/guest legend, So Long at the Fair appears to have invented the idea of wily, mercenary Parisian hoteliers hushing things up.  And the Bartons’ previous port of call on their European travels was Naples – enough said!  When Johnny is eventually tracked down in the hospital, the Paris head of police (Austin Trevor) melodramatically informs Vicky that her brother’s condition is hopeless:  he has ‘ze Black Death!’  A sensible English doctor (André Morell) – a friend of George Hathaway’s – then examines the patient and expresses cautious optimism that Johnny will pull through.

    It’s an amusing coincidence that, twenty years later, Dirk Bogarde would find himself playing a man increasingly convinced that Venice is covering up a cholera outbreak, for commercial reasons similar to Madame Hervé’s.  Although Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) and So Long at the Fair are worlds apart in most other respects, their protagonists have a couple of things in common:  both have reasons to doubt their sanity and both are very well played.  The main character here is Jean Simmons’ gaslit Vicky rather than Bogarde’s George.  Only twenty-one at the time, Simmons commands the screen and holds the film together:  she’s an instinctive actress, as natural as she is charismatic.  Bogarde hasn’t in fact much to do but he does it with grace and wit.  On first meeting the Bartons, George regretfully supposes they’re a married couple; in conversation with Johnny, he refers to Vicky as ‘your wife’ and Johnny puts him right.  ‘Oh, bad luck’, replies George, hardly able to believe his own luck or suppress a joyful laugh.  Bogarde’s delivery of the line made me laugh with him.

    George isn’t alone in assuming Johnny and Vicky are a romantic pair and So Long at the Fair‘s culminating surprise is that this assumption isn’t entirely wrong.  Once Nina is dead, George is Vicky’s only hope of proving the truth, though she doesn’t know it at first.  When he dropped the O’Donovans off at the Hotel de Licorne, George didn’t have change to tip the carriage driver so Johnny offered to lend him fifty francs, giving his name and room number so that George could pay him back.  In due course, Vicky finds a note from George, addressed to her brother and enclosing the money:  this not only is vital evidence that Johnny was a hotel guest but seems an ideal means of developing her relationship with George.  That does happen as he helps her expose the hotel’s jiggery-pokery but the romantic element is minimised.  While they’re investigating the layout of hotel rooms on the first versus the second floor, George has Vicky disguise her face with a mask (the kind worn at a masked ball); when Narcisse makes an unwanted appearance, George, in order to obscure Vicky further from view and prevent her being recognised, takes her in his arms and kisses her at length.  That, of course, is just what George has been longing to do – but there’s no follow-up to the  clinch.  In the film’s climax, the emphasis is on Vicky’s being reunited with Johnny.  Whereas we didn’t see her reaction to George’s long embrace, the camera now concentrates on Jean Simmons’  face, and Vicky’s unmasked emotion, as she stands at the foot of her brother’s bed.  (Johnny remains unseen throughout this closing sequence.)  Vicky then turns to leave the room;  George escorts her out but almost paternally.

    It turns out that Vicky Barton’s sentimental priorities are implicit in the original novel’s and this screen version’s title – never mind that the words of the old rhyme ‘Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be?’ (‘Johnny’s so long at the fair’) are surely those of a jilted sweetheart rather than an anxious sibling.  I’d seen part of the film before:  I got home from BFI one evening when Sally was halfway through watching it on ITVX, where it’s still available.  In its entirety, it’s less bewildering and rather more clumsy than it seemed on this first, partial encounter.  But So Long at the Fair is still appealingly unusual.

    12 March 2025

     

     

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