Marco Bellocchio (2009)

Marco Bellocchio will always be a famous name to me because he directed China Is Near, the first movie reviewed in Pauline Kael’s Going Steady collection.  She was much impressed by the work of a young director, who’s now seventy years old.   His IMDB filmography shows that Bellocchio has been making films pretty regularly in the four decades since China Is Near (some of them for Italian television) but Vincere is the first picture of his that I’ve seen.  It’s the story of Ida Dalser, the mistress and perhaps the first wife of Benito Mussolini (although documentary proof of their marriage has never been found), and certainly the mother of his first child, Benito Albino.  It seems that Mussolini and Ida were estranged only a few months after the birth of their son and that he married another woman, Rachele Guidi, before the end of 1915.  After he came to power in Italy in 1922, Ida and her son were placed under police surveillance and written evidence of her connection with Mussolini was destroyed, wherever possible:  Ida Dalser was erased from the public record.   In the mid-1920s she was forcibly interned in a mental institution in Perugia, where she continued to insist that Mussolini had married her first.  Ida was transferred to another asylum, on an island off Venice, where she died in 1937, aged fifty-seven, without ever seeing either Mussolini or her son again.  Benito Albino, who continued to insist that his mother had been the wife of Il Duce, was eventually put in an asylum too.  He died in 1942 at the age of twenty-six, three years before his father.

Once you’ve seen the trailer for Vincere (I must have watched it three or four times in recent weeks), you’ve more or less seen the picture – not, of course, all its technical accomplishments but the essential story and themes which, over the course of two hours, are stretched very thin.   The film’s style is operatic – not just in the sense that it has a theatrically rich, powerful score by Carlo Crivelli (with some help from Philip Glass) but in the overall dramatic style of the piece, which is unsubtly intense and repetitive.   There are two episodes in the Perugia madhouse which, in the context of the whole, are unusually restrained and naturalistic.  First, Ida (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) talks with a quietly sympathetic psychiatrist (Corrado Invernizzi) who believes her story but encourages her to take things more gently if she’s to stand a chance of getting out of the place.   Then her mental health is tested by another official (Bruno Cariello), who appears to take her seriously.  (His question ‘How many eyes do men and women have?’ elicits the answer ‘Two – except for Polyfemus, and he was a Cyclops’ :  this is one of the film’s few amusing moments.)  Ida seems to be on the point of abandoning her claims until she’s told that she won’t be released immediately in any case.   Given the stylistic consistency of Vincere, it may seem silly to suggest it should all have been done naturalistically instead; yet the unassertive power of these two sequences does make you feel that Ida Dalser’s fate might have been more shocking and affecting if the film hadn’t been so relentlessly melodramatic from the start.  For example, Bellocchio stages the wedding of Ida and Mussolini (Filippo Timi) as if the fate of a nation depended on it:  perhaps it did but the picture might still have hit harder if the affair between Mussolini and Ida had been presented less emphatically, more humanly.

Giovanna Mezzogiorno is evidently a good actress but her performance as Ida can hardly be described as wide-ranging.  This isn’t surprising:  the character that Bellocchio and his co-writer Daniela Ceselli have created is no more than what Ida is in the plot – Mussolini’s wronged wife.  (Mezzogiorno’s face occasionally brings to mind the young Debra Winger, although she’s much less vivid, in this role anyway.)   Ida’s story, as told here, covers around a quarter of a century.  It’s refreshing to see a character age without reliance on obvious wigs and make-up but the result is that Ida doesn’t get old enough.  After several years locked up in an insane asylum, she’s unsurprisingly lost the bloom and hopefulness of the young beautician who sold everything she owned to finance Mussolini’s new newspaper venture (Il Popolo d’Italia) but she doesn’t suggest a woman in late middle age. The idea may be that Ida is frozen in time at the point at which her life with Mussolini ends.  Even so, it’s a curious decision on Bellocchio’s part to forego the opportunity of expressing the physically attritional effects of Ida’s stubborn determination to prove her identity.

It is dramatically effective, however, that, once Mussolini has rejected Ida, he disappears from Vincere – except as a figure carved in stone or who appears in newsreel records of the real thing (there’s a remarkable assemblage of library film, as well as point-making excerpts from Italian and Hollywood movies of the period).   Switching to archive footage in this way runs the risk of nullifying the performance of an actor playing an historical figure but that doesn’t happen here.  The fact that the man has vanished and been replaced by a public image conveys a sense of Ida’s loss.  Besides, Filippo Timi as Mussolini is certainly the best thing in the picture.  He’s a commanding presence; his strong features and profile resonate with that of the sculpted bust of Il Duce we see later (even though Timi doesn’t particularly resemble Mussolini).  Whereas Mussolini as an orator seems like a bad actor, the rapid, urgent voice that Timi uses in the early scenes suggests a real person.  Fabrizio Costella, who plays Ida’s son, has a grave, puzzled melancholy which is touching.  It seems like a clever idea to have Filippo Timi play the adult version of Benito Albino.  He has a spiritual connection with Costella but Timi is too old to be fully convincing as a young man of twenty.   When a group of fellow students encourage Benito Albino to do an impression of Mussolini, Timi makes a very good stab at trying to bring out both the father’s loony quality as a public speaker and the son’s furiously confused feelings but the scene is too schematic; it ends up as little more than another big operatic moment.

The main sequence in which Mussolini and Ida have sex is extremely well done.  While she murmurs, ‘I love you’, and cries out as they climax, he is silent:  it’s as if his mind is elsewhere, as if he’s already thinking ahead.  The scene is shot in what seems a dense darkness; the only light is what the camera picks up from Timi’s eyes (you might call them ‘demon eyes’ if it wasn’t now impossible to use that phrase).   There’s a demonstration going on in the street and Mussolini walks naked from their bed to the window – like a sleepwalker answering the call of destiny.  Ida follows him and puts a sheet round his shoulders.  The whole of this passage in Vincere is imaginative and powerful but other key moments don’t seem to be so well thought through.    In the scene in which Benito Albino mimics his father, for example, it’s not clear how the young man relates to and is seen by the other students in the group.  I didn’t understand either how deep seated Ida’s apparent conviction that Mussolini’s disowning her is really a way of testing her love was meant to be.  At one stage, it seems an unshakeable delusion but it’s dropped very quickly after her conversation with the nice psychiatrist in the Perugia asylum (where the other inmates, including a fey ballet dancer, are very familiar types from screen mental institutions).

Bellocchio has a flair for the instantly dramatic but I was left unsure what, on reflection, some of the most striking sequences added up to.  In the opening scene, the young socialist Mussolini, in the company of a group of Catholics, dares God to strike him dead within the next five minutes and, when the Almighty fails to oblige, asserts that he’s proved the non-existence of God.   We see Ida smiling admiringly at this performance:  she’s tickled to see this dashing young man upsetting the traditional older generation, and attracted by him too.  But since the sequence really reveals Mussolini’s ludicrous (deadly serious) egocentricity – as if his issuing the challenge compels God to take the bait – it’s hard to understand why she, or we, should take him seriously.  There are some eloquent images in Vincere:  a shot in which Mussolini fights a duel, with swords, in a landscape overseen by looming industrial chimneys; Ida climbing up the huge, barred asylum window as snow falls outside.   She throws letters insisting her identity into the blizzard; the moment recalls the leaflets in the wind that Mussolini catches in the earlier scene when he moves ineluctably to the window and Ida’s pieces of paper seem to merge with the snowflakes in the dark sky.   All in all, though, Vincere lacks dramatic substance and texture.  It’s the latest Italian film to be (no doubt because there’s such a desire to see a renaissance of Italian cinema’s great days) overrated.

23 May 2010