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
