Vincere

I found this movie extremely absorbing, from beginning to end. It's true what other critics have observed that the real Mussolini in the old newsreels looks quite different from the actor personifying him, and the sudden confrontations between one and the other are quite unsettling.

Could it be that recreating this historical newsreels with this actor as Mussolini was not possible due to the insufficient budget? Or maybe the director wanted to show us the real Mussolini to give us a good idea about the individual? Another confusing issue: The actor playing Mussolini also plays his adult son.

And we don't get to see the final days of this dictator, when he was involved with Clara (Claretta) Petacci, his last lover, twenty eight years younger and executed with him (and both corpses hanged upside down in the public square).

The photography and the camera work are exquisite, as are the lighting --absolute perfection-- the acting --masterful-- and the music --excellent.

Very somber movie, shot most of the time in heavy darkness; there is no comic relief whatsoever, not even light humor, but then, the story is extremely dark and tragic, something that could have come out from a Dorothy Parker story.

Six years after his intimate reimagining of the Aldo Moro kidnapping that rocked Italy in the Seventies in 'Buongiorno, notte,' Bellocchio has made another haunting and even more sweeping and iconic historical film. 'Vincere' is about Benito Mussolini's secret first wife and son, who were hidden away and both died in insane asylums. 'Vincere' depicts a strange, distorted period in Italian history, and skillfully melds stock footage with recreations, black and white with color (rich in reds, alternating with ashen grays), public tumult with private torment. Visually lush and full of chiaroscuro, 'Vincere is also a showcase for the talents of Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalzer, the woman who met Benito Mussolini when he was the editor of Avanti, an ardent Socialist with strong populist, anti-monarchical, anti-clerical views, who dramatically dares God, if He exists, to strike him down.

Opening sequences alternate between 1907 when Ida first meets Mussolini (Filippo Timi) in Trent, and 1914 in Milan. She is a respectable middle-class woman with a beauty salon. On the eve of WWI, he shifts from pacifist liberal to pro-war rightist. Deathly afraid of ending in mediocrity, he is ravenous for power. Ida intensely supports him whatever his direction, and sells all her possessions, including jewels, furniture, and her business, to support his newspaper. This leads to the founding of the paper "Il Popolo d'Italia," which becomes a fascist rallying-point. The film makes clear that she is madly in love but never mad. It also makes clear that though he declares his love of her and fathers a son named Benito, born just before he goes off to the front, whom he acknowledges, and they evidently marry, he keeps a certain distance.

In WWI Mussolini is wounded in the army and is pleased to be congratulated by the king. When Ida finds him he is being tended in hospital by a new lover, a woman named Rachele (Michela Cescon). This is the last time Ida sees him in person.

As Mussolini rises to power and becomes the dictator known as "Il Duce," linking himself with the ancient Roman emperors and dreaming of world domination, Ida is more and more kept away from him, and appears as a figure on the outskirts of power, at the center only of sporadic and operatic encounters during which she pleads for recognition and attention, only to be swept aside. She has a marriage certificate but it becomes lost. All her papers are taken. Mussolini remains with Rachele, is married to her, and fathers children by her. He conceals that he was married to Ida.

Ida, who calls herself Ida Mussolini and her son Benito or Benitino Albino Mussolini, is a woman obsessed, whom others urge to move on, but will not give up her pursuit of her idol and the man she believes to be the love of her life. For a while she is put under a kind of house arrest with her sister, then confined in one insane asylum and then another, while her son is taken away and sent to boarding school. She writes letters of protest to everyone, including the king and the pope; this of course only makes her seem crazy, but in a hearing it's evident that she is tragically obsessed, but lucid, and in fact she is never declared insane. A psychiatrist (Corrado Invernizzi) vows to help her, but she is taken elsewhere before he can do so.

The film is rife with operatic passages featuring bright lights, dark shadows, violent storms and heavy rainfall, and yet retains its own kind of lucidity; it's clear that the country and not Ida is mad, and Il Duce is the head madman. The most haunting scene shows an actual speech by Mussolini at the height of his power in which the gestures and facial contortions are not only ugly and strange but unmistakably those of a dangerous madman. Cut to the now grown son of Ida, doing an imitation of Mussolini's speechifying and himself appearing genuinely deranged. Records show both mother and son received treatments that were akin to torture, and Ida was incarcerated for eleven years. The son died at the age of 26; Ida Dalser died at 57, 30 years after she first met Mussolini Italy's eventual fascist dictator.

Since the film's protagonist is on the periphery, it makes sense that eventually we know Mussolini only through the newsreels she occasionally sees, which are brilliantly integrated into the film; it's hard to convey how striking and integral these images are. There are also haunting still portraits of Ida, showing her at progressive stages of suffering. The film's sense of pictorialism is augmented by a sense of the visual language of the period, heightened by a scene in which Mussolini is introduced to the Italian Futurists and their paintings, and excellent use is made of Futurist and Fascist graphic design and fonts. The sound track is powerful but muted.

The film in fact is most satisfying visually, and despite Giovanna Mezzogiorno's dedication to her performance as the independent yet long-suffering woman, there is a lack of three-dimensionality in the characterizations: the figures are monumental but not quite human. The focus becomes a bit distant even on Ida as her torments increase, and there is nothing about the private life of Il Duce. Finally there is not the intimacy Bellocchio achieved in 'Good Morning, Night,' except in the first intimate scenes between the young (still hairy) Benito and Ida. Nonetheless, the effect of the whole film is both sick-making and scary.

Though Bellocchio's style here is operatic, it's a swift-moving, elegant, contemporary kind of opera, and it works.

An IFC film, 'Vincere' was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes and was also shown at Telluride, and Toronto. I saw it at a preview screening of the New York Film Festival.

"Vincere" is an artful biopic that tells the story of Benito Mussolini's mistress and perhaps first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). The film jumps around the time line, mainly from the point of view of Ida, with a mixture of heated political rallies and shout fests, intense love scenes (mostly early in the movie, hidden in darkness), real footage of a pompous Mussolini, and operatic melodrama.

It's not a biopic of Mussolini, but we see glimpses of his early socialist and atheist convictions, his conversion to fascism, and his eventual support for the church (for politically expedient purposes until old age, judging from the history). We hear Mussolini dream of an Italy that surpasses morality and brings about fundamental changes. He's not specific, but he doesn't want to become like average folk. He wants to outdo even Napoleon.

The film follows a TV documentary and two books about Ida, based on reporting by Marco Zeni. In the reports, Ida Dalser claims she married Benito Mussolini in 1914. She also had a son with him, named Benito Albino Mussolini. Historians don't have direct evidence she married Mussolini, but they have evidence he accepted responsibility for their son. For unknown reasons, he left her a year later and married Rachele Guidi after returning from the war.

According to the history (not the film), his last mistress, Clara Petacci, was executed (by firing squad) and hung upside down in the Piazza Loreto (Milan) along with him. Ida might have had that to look forward to if she had been by his side (she doesn't seem like a stay at home or turn a blind eye type of wife – she would have been with him). Tragic madness is a common theme in drama, and Ida Dalser arguably has a touch of madness. Her love affair with Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi) operatically moves from intense devotion to angry feud. She sells everything to fund his newspaper, gives him a son, and attempts to force him to divorce his wife and return her to her rightful place by his side. She won't even think of another man. Is it love, true devotion, or revenge?

Most of the film tracks Ida Dalser in extremes of emotion, especially as corrupt Fascists suppress her and take her to a madhouse. She writes to everyone to try to publicize her marriage, including the pope, and she drags her son to Mussolini to dramatically express her outrage. My first thought in trying to describe Ida was, well, at least she didn't kill her son to get back at him. The movie doesn't explicitly depict her doing anything this mischievous, or perhaps the unthinkable is possible.

Did she succeed in sacrificing her son to get back at Mussolini? It's possible she embellished her relationship with Mussolini and her extreme conviction rubbed off on her son. The odd thing is that this interpretation fits with Giovanna Mezzogiorno's compelling performance of Ida throughout the film. She seems in love with more than Mussolini. She wants to stand by his side and be the public wife of a dictator. For example, she won't consider signing a power of attorney to help provide financially for her son because it might be seen by (her imagined) Mussolini as disloyalty. She refuses to lie about her marriage to return home for the sake of her son.

At a minimum, she was adamant in trying to embarrass Mussolini, and she did so despite the welfare of her son. (History is less fair to Ida than the film since it also implicates her publicly denouncing Mussolini as a traitor.) She's noble in her resoluteness to truth (if the marriage is true, of course). But why wouldn't she move on when Mussolini has already married someone else? Is a country better off when political scandals come out about a politician's personal love affairs? Is her resoluteness to truth really a resoluteness to power and status, or revenge?

It's easier to feel sympathy for her since the Fascists also abused their power beyond any respect for justice. The film doesn't necessarily demonize Mussolini. But only someone as powerful and ruthless as a dictator is able to persecute and silence his accusers (whether wife and son, or otherwise) rather than face them in court. It's a clear case of corruption and abuse of power.

We could go back and forth between the two sides eternally. If she had remained silent, she wouldn't have been in an asylum in the first place, and Fascist doctors wouldn't have been around to try to force her to lie about her marriage. However, she wouldn't have ended up in an asylum in a just and moral country. But sometimes it's best to remain silent about some truths if they aren't in your (or your son's) best interest. And so on. The film allows you to make your own interpretation and to spread the blame around as you like. The musical score has a beautiful (and loud) recurring piece that builds up dramatically and ends in low scratchy strings. The film begins and transitions emphatically, almost mimicking Mussolini's exclamation of "boom, boom, boom" as he praises a painting. It plays like a silent film in some sequences, such as a comical scene of political advocates fighting with one another as silhouettes in front of a classic movie projector.

Some of the sets nicely recreate Italy of the time period (Mussolini's duel, with factories in the background, is one of the best), but you don't get a chance to linger on them and the lighting is dark. It would be interesting to compare the film on DVD to the version played at theaters to see if the DVD is any darker than intended. As it is, it's best to view the film in complete darkness to get the benefit of its subtle lighting.

Note: The subtitles translate "Vincere" as a verb, meaning "to win".

If the film-writer wanted to emphasize WHY the young Mussolini hated the church, he did a great job. The church's role in backing the power-mad dictator is demonstrated again and again. The movie shows his wife as clear-minded, yet her actions even after the priest has cautioned her on how to 'act' and appear to submit, indicate a crazed woman who can't believe that her actions are hopeless in the light of the corrupt country that Italy has become. there are many parallels to the United States here, as our country becomes increasingly an oligarchy, ruled by corporations with few in Congress not bought by their bribes.

Makes you wonder if speaking out does any good in such a hypocritical, ignorant time in which the T-Partiers, not realizing they embody the rants of Mussolini, speak to the low-esteem, the animalistic urges of the masses. This was a fantastic movie and I was amazed that there were so few in the audience, though not amazed that it appeared at our art movie houses here in Boston (the West Newton's adjunct, the Arlington's Capitol).

Marco Bellocchio directed and wrote (with Daniela Ceselli) this very dark version of the private life of Benito Mussolini, a portion of his life that centered on his mistress and the mother of his son, one Ida Dalser. Though the film never really reveals whether Ida Dasler and Mussolini were married (Mussolini already had a wife and child when he me the devastatingly beautiful and erotic Ida) but that simply doesn't seem to matter while watching this artistic triumph of a film. What the director does manage to portray is the life and times of Italy before, during, and after WW I, a time during which Mussolini began his influence as a socialist and ultimately founded Italian Fascism, becoming the Fascist dictator of Italy. The many permutations of the concepts of monarchism and socialism and eventually Fascism are delineated by the film, if at times as shadowy in their explanation as is the director's love of dark in lighting the screen during almost all of the action. Bellocchio uses black and white film clips throughout his film giving it a somewhat documentary flair, but the performances by the actors make this film very much a visceral drama and not a dry rehash of history.

Filippo Timi gives a gripping performance as both Mussolini the ardent and handsome lover and politician whose life is always controlled by the term 'Vincere' ('Win'). Aptly, when the bulky monster Mussolini rises out of the socialism into fascism and the war the part of Mussolini is 'played' by the film clips of the real person. But as the film draws toward the end of his life, Timi once again enters the film in the role of his son Benito Albino Mussolini, a lad stricken with insanity and confined to a sanitarium. As Mussolini's mistress (aka 'wife' by her accounts) Ida Dalser, Giovanna Mezzogiorno offers one of the strongest cinematic portrayals of an important woman of history. She is simply riveting - erotic when the romance begins, faithful even when she discovers Mussolini has a wife, and uncontrollably fierce as she is confined by the government (with Mussolini's approval) to an insane asylum. This is one of those performances that will live in memory long after this film is seen and hopefully will garner awards when the Oscar season comes round.

In all this is a beautifully wrought, intelligent, beautifully acted, occasionally confusing melodrama that sheds light on the man Mussolini, his rise to power, and the women who came under his influence. Recommended.

Grady Harp