Italian cinema was once distinguished for its postwar “neorealism” movement, with films that were shot on location in a stripped down, almost documentary style, exemplified by titles like Rossellini‘s Rome, Open City (1946) and de Sica‘s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Times seem to have changed, though not necessarily for the worse. With a few notable exceptions (i.e. Gomorrah), the majority of Italian films I’ve seen in the past few years have been a distinctly eccentric, energetic and often abstract bunch, from Emanuele Crialese‘s Golden Door to Paolo Sorrentino‘s recent Il Divo. Marco Bellocchio‘s Vincere (“Win”) certainly falls into this latter category.
Vincere tells the story of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), lover and alleged first wife to Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi). This couple, as presented in the film in the years before World War I, is a cockeyed pair, to say the least. He is a man in need of victory and conquest. She is extremely eager to have him conquer her. She bears him a son, Benito Albino Mussolini (played in his later years, again by Timi, as a bit of a nut himself). She even sells all of her possessions to raise money for his Socialist newspaper.
This relationship eventually comes to be swept under the rug by Mussolini and his Fascist regime, and Dalser and her son are separated and sent to a mental institution and Catholic orphanage, respectively. Il Duce only acknowledges his second marriage, with Rachele Guidi. No one, including Dalser herself, seem able to produce any proof of her marriage. Throughout all of this, Mezzogiorno sustains a glint of serene madness in her eyes, her worship for the eventual dictator apparently unflagging.
Stylistically, Vincere has a madness all its own, making ingenious use of stock and newsreel footage in an almost German Expressionist style, accompanied by an aggressive, martial score by Carlo Crivelli, with its percussive string motifs and plummeting glissandos. The overall effect is unsettling but entertaining in an over-the-top, pulpy way. In the end, Vincere doesn’t really try very hard to champion Dalser’s case, but rather examines the highest and lowest paths insanity can follow in a larger society, and how those paths are too often determined by violence and gender. – [DVD]
Biography/Drama/History
Rated R