Piazza delle cinque lune

Good photography and visual effects don't save this movie from being really ugly. That's it.

After decades, the kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro still has mysterious sides. It would have been nice to see something like JFK by Oliver Stone, with an accurate reconstruction of facts, and the director guiding us toward the truth about it (or at least some believable hypothesis), in a clear and logical way, as to be understood even by those who are not familiar with the facts. But what comes out here is half a thriller, a low quality one that falls in every cliché of its genre but that is not exciting at all, and half a confused documentary, with the characters giving us a huge amount of hard to place details. And even though the theory exposed is absolutely believable, the characters' research is still based upon FICTIONAL proof, as the reel of footage they examine doesn't actually exist…

So I think I still don't get this: what was the point of making such a movie? With all my respect for the very talented actors who played it, didn't they have better things to do??

On the eve of retirement a respected and fair minded honest judge is given a film of the murder of Aldo Moro. Troubled by what he sees and by strange events around him the judge begins to investigate what really happened to Moro.

This is a well acted but run of the mill thriller. Donald Sutherland as the judge is good, as always, but he is given very little to do other than move from place to place to reveal the next plot point (in more than one sense). The problem is that unless you know what happened to Moro and what that meant for Italy you're going to be left out in the cold for a good chunk of this film. I'm not saying that you can't enjoy the film not knowing what happened, you can, its just that the deeper implications will be lost. I myself was lost, since the Moro murder was so long ago and effected me very little here in the US. I wish they had taken a page out of Oliver Stone's JFK and constructed the film in such away that it brought you into the story and the events in such away that you didn't know you were being spoon fed. There is no effort to tell you anything, it just throws you in. Its disappointing.

This should have been a good thriller and instead its just okay. If Aldo Moro and his death are well known to you you then odds are you'll find this a better movie. If Moro means nothing to you this is just another political thriller based on real events saved by good performances.

Piazza delle cinque luna, is an Italian political thriller, which takes a fictional approach to a real event. Focusing, upon the true story of the kidnapping and ultimate death of Italian political leader Aldo Moro, the film imagines a regional judge (played by Donald Sutherland) discovering clues that lead him to a vast conspiracy. Despite fast pacing, interesting (though strangle dubbed) acting , and brilliant cinematography the film fails to transpose itself to wider international stage.

Basically, unless you happen to know something about Italian politics of the 1970s, it is rather like (what I imagine) would be the experience of a Martian watching a fictional film about the assassination of JFK: one is baffled by a mass of evidence in amazing detail- from info about the type bullets, to who kept the sink running in adjacent apartment. (All of which, incidentally, characters apparently pull out of their underpants in the form of files with surreal amounts of information.) Yet, unless one knows enough about the actual history to sort fact from fiction (or to be deeply interested in the tragedy which inspired the story), it strikes one as incompressible jumble of strange and irrelevant facts.

I would only recommend it to a person teaching a course in Italian politics, or who was willing to do some advance googling on the subject, and then I would warn this person that the over all plot is very predictable and the political conspiracy naive. This is too bad because the cinematography and the overall concept are both excellent.

The only reason I rated it as high as I did, is because I appreciate the feeling of dreamlike alienation it caused, but this is clearly not for everyone.