Le soldatesse

This almost Dreyer-like deeply poetic film about 'faces' is one of the most brilliant of the ‘60s and one of the most inexplicably neglected and forgotten. I'd rank this as Zurlini's 2nd greatest achievement after the awe-inspiring existentialist technicolor masterpiece `Family Diary' starring Marcello Mastroianni. Zurlini's deliberate use of a slightly over-the-top melodramatic style of acting within a basically neo-realist approach that makes room for Antonioni-like meditative takes, allows him to make his points in an ‘extra-real' and poetic zone where things are more symbolically flexible, dreamlike and fluid, closer to myth. It's a very difficult and fragile intuitive balancing act and sometimes, as in the cases of `Violent Summer' and `Girl With The Suitcase' not much more than a gorgeously photographed melodrama results. But the balance is definitely right on "Le Soldattese," "The Professor," and "Black Jesus."

Shot almost entirely on location in Greece in an awesome deep-focus newreel-documentary style black-and-white (with the emphasis on the blacks), `Le Soldattesse' is the story a group of prostitutes that have been recruited for the military brothels of Italian soldiers during WW II, and the long truck ride they take trying to get to their destinations through a war-torn mountainous area. Three military men of different rank have the job of taking them through, and the relationships they develop with the girls on this trip is the real subject matter of the film. Sublimely beautiful Sixties New-Wave icon Anna Karina plays the most cheerful of the ladies of leisure but there are no real leads in the film, all 5 or 6 of the main characters are given equal screen time and Zurlini never falters once as he draws poetic and hilarous performances full of insights from each character. On a higher level "Le Soldattese" becomes a deep examination of one relatively minor but revealing absurdity (prostitutes being carried to brothels in a war-torn area to boost troop morale) overlapping the bigger, related absurdity of the war itself and Mussolini-era fascism.

Shot in 1965, this film is born at the intersection of post-neorealism and a shifting European consciousness that, two decades after the end of World War II, began to reflect on the war not only as a grand historical moment but as a sum of fractured, morally ambiguous personal experiences. This film stands apart from traditional WWII narratives-those centered on combat heroics, aerial dogfights, or stoic resistance fighters-and instead roots itself in the quiet brutality and bureaucratic absurdity of the occupation experience, particularly in the Balkans, an underrepresented front in war cinema. It refrains from the spectacle of battlefields and turns instead toward the grinding, daily violence endured by the powerless in militarized zones. It's not a film about winning or losing; it's about the corruption of meaning in a war that has already swallowed everything.

Cinematically, the film adheres to a sparse, almost documentary-like aesthetic that evokes the spirit of neorealism but with tighter formal control and a subtler emotional register. The cinematography, often handheld and naturalistic, gives a tactility to the environments: crumbling mountain roads, makeshift encampments, the interior of army trucks that feel less like military vehicles and more like mobile prisons. The camera remains intentionally restrained, refusing to aestheticize suffering. Lighting is mostly diegetic and low-key, rendering scenes in subdued earth tones that emphasize the grimy realism of the characters' condition rather than dramatizing it. This visual discipline is essential to the film's tone-stoic, quiet, and suffocatingly intimate.

What most distinguishes the film is its focus on the psychological topography of war rather than its physical battles. The performances serve this vision with an impressive range of emotional minimalism. There's no theatricality, no grand gestures, but instead a simmering tension that's both social and internal. The characters are largely forced into roles they neither chose nor understand, and the actors embody this state with admirable restraint. The lead male character, an Italian officer, is portrayed with a numbed weariness that resists the archetype of the reluctant hero and instead speaks of institutionalized impotence-he is complicit, aware, and ultimately paralyzed. The women-who in other hands could have easily been reduced to symbols or mere victims-are allowed their own moral dimensions, even if the structure of the narrative denies them agency. The result is not catharsis but a slow erosion, which is the film's true thematic thrust.

Musically, the score is minimal and wisely so. It avoids manipulating the audience and only emerges occasionally, usually as a counterpoint rather than a cue. The silence is where the film breathes. One hears boots on gravel, the rumble of the truck, or the irregularities of breath and voice-all woven into the texture of the film with painstaking attention. This creates a disquieting sense of proximity: the audience is never allowed the comfort of distance.

From a technical perspective, the editing favors long takes and slow dissolves, placing emphasis on spatial continuity and the oppressive linearity of the journey. The rhythm is deliberate, sometimes frustratingly so, but this slowness is part of the film's ideological project. It forces the viewer to sit with the unbearable, not as spectacle but as endurance. There is no release valve, no act of redemption, and no climax in the conventional sense. The war is not a backdrop-it is the atmosphere, the texture of every frame, and it weighs on every character, not just in their actions but in their silences.

What elevates this film beyond a simple moral tale is its deeply neorealist poetics. Not just in aesthetic choices-on-location shooting, non-theatrical performances, natural lighting, and sparse dialogue-but in its narrative ethic. The film doesn't stage moral dilemmas with the intent of resolving them; it presents situations where moral language itself becomes insufficient. In this, it draws from the most rigorous tradition of Italian neorealism, not its softened, post-1950s derivatives. It offers neither redemption nor condemnation in facile terms. It offers contradiction, fatigue, silence, gestures too small to signify resistance but too human to ignore. It commits fully to the realism of spiritual collapse, a realism that lives in long takes of weary faces, in the inertia of a military truck that never stops moving yet goes nowhere.

But more than that, the film subverts what post-war Italian cinema-often complicit in sanitizing Italy's role during the conflict-has traditionally projected: the myth of "italiani brava gente." This persistent national self-image, both historiographically and cinematically constructed, depicts Italian soldiers as somehow morally superior to their German allies-humane, reluctant participants, or even unconscious saboteurs of fascist brutality. Much of post-war cinema contributed to this mythology, offering characters who were either good-hearted civilians caught in the machinery of war or soldiers whose worst flaw was confusion, not cruelty.

The brilliance of this film lies in how it at first appears to play into that narrative. The first half subtly lulls the viewer into a familiar rhythm: the soldier-officer protagonist appears to be thoughtful, even uncomfortable with his task; the convoy he leads seems more like a burden than a mission; his interactions with the women suggest an awkward, almost sympathetic detachment. It's an opening that seems to set up yet another tale of moral distance between Italians and the Nazi atrocities we are more accustomed to confronting on screen.

But this is not a story of moral distance. It is a story of convergence. As the narrative unfolds, and the landscape becomes more hostile, so too do the characters. The mask slips-not suddenly, not with a dramatic twist, but with a steady, almost imperceptible descent into complicity and violence. The film exposes how quickly the posture of moral superiority erodes when authority is threatened or when anonymity permits cruelty. What begins as passive tolerance of injustice becomes active participation. The officer's ambiguous humanity becomes a thin layer masking a latent authoritarianism, a cowardice disguised as decency.

Here, the film reveals itself as a political act, not through slogans or explicit critique, but through structure and narrative rhythm. The viewer is led to trust, to empathize, only to be implicated. We are seduced by the same myth that the post-war culture cultivated, and then forced to reckon with its collapse. The barbarity inflicted by Italian forces in the Balkans-so often minimized in both national memory and cinematic representation-is here made visible, not through graphic spectacle, but through its cold procedural repetition. This is violence without necessity, without passion, without ideology-a violence born of order, discipline, and the indifference of tired men in uniform.

And yet, despite this bleakness, the film's poetic commitment to realism keeps it from collapsing into cynicism. There is still a faith-not in people, not in armies, but in cinema itself as a means of unmasking. The director does not need to preach, because the frame accuses. The pacing, the silences, the shifting gazes-all testify to a truth too often buried under layers of national self-absolution. The film's power lies in this very restraint: it doesn't scream at the viewer, it lets them arrive at horror step by step, until they can no longer feign ignorance.

It is a quiet repudiation of national mythologies, disguised as a character study, staged as a military routine. And that makes it not only rare, but essential.