Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi 15A cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 124 min
THIS DERANGED, operatic study of Benito Mussolini’s early life is packed full of arresting shots, each of which encapsulates the film’s careering ambition and hostility to restraint. One example will suffice.
Watch as the characters make their way down a pathway on the outskirts of the city. An array of satanic factories line up rigidly and allow symmetric plumes of smoke to stream obediently leftwards. In the foreground, absurdly romantic roses crowd their way towards the limits of the frame.
Perhaps director Marco Bellocchio is deliberately aping the bold, futuristic propaganda of early fascism. Elsewhere, mottos, delivered in rigid type, fly at the audience while martial music blares from the speakers.
Are totalitarian aesthetics being consciously used in an argument against totalitarianism, or has Bellocchio been unwittingly seduced by his own unlovely subject? Whatever the answer, Vincereproves to be indecently entertaining and appropriately shocking throughout.
The film has an interesting story to tell. While a rising firebrand, Mussolini married Ida (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and sired a son. Later, when cosying up to the Catholic Church, the dictator denied his wife and allowed her to be placed in a mental asylum.
The film’s focus is Ida, and Mezzogiorno does a fine job of conveying the war between naivety and intelligence (she gives herself to a selfish megalomaniac, after all) that stands in for larger conflicts affecting the Italian people. Her efforts would, however, be as nothing without a charismatic Mussolini. Thankfully, Filippo Timi is on hand to tempt us with a faintly disgusting, but undeniably fascinating display of deranged arrogance.
Like other recent Italian films (
Il Divo, I Am Love),
Vinceredisplays the pros and cons of straining for the operatic. There are as many moments of drunken absurdity as there are of transcendent bliss. You are certainly never likely to be bored.
