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Vincere (2009)

Director: Marco Bellocchio

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From Time Out Online

Reviewed at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival

Marco Bellocchio’s career stretches back to the mid-‘60s and ‘Fists in the Pocket’ and ‘China Is Near’. Subsequent decades have traced an uneven trajectory, highlights including ‘In the Name of the Father’ (1971), ‘Leap into the Void’ (1980), ‘My Mother’s Smile’ (2002) and ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2004). Not that Cannes ever really ignored him: the last 15 years have also seen ‘The Prince of Homburg’, ‘The Nanny’ and ‘The Wedding Director’ honoured on the Croisette.Few of Bellocchio’s films can have carried quite the weight of his latest, however. ‘Vincere’ manages to succeed both as historical melodrama and as a salutary reminder that history tends to repeat itself.

Based on a true story and kicking off in the years before the First World War, it centres on Ida Dalser, a woman whom we first encounter helping to protect Benito Mussolini, then a young journalist and union activist, from an angry mob. Some years later she sees him again, demonstrating to another angry audience his ‘proof’ that God doesn’t exist, and an affair begins. Passionately in love, Ida supports her lover’s professional ambitions and bears him a child, only to discover that he already has a wife and family. Even that she is prepared to tolerate, but as Benito’s Fascists gain power, both her own presence and her son’s become unwelcome irritants to his career.

The story itself, while fascinating and rooted in fact, is hardly packed with surprises, but what distinguishes ‘Vincere’ is the flair with which the tale is related. First, one should certainly mention the excellent lead performances of Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida and Filippo Timi as Mussolini. But even more impressive is Bellocchio’s virtuosity in combining drama, archive footage, and music – not merely Carlo Crivelli’s thundering orchestral score but various existing works both classical and popular – to create a highly cinematic oratorio of enormous rhetorical force: a style, by the way, which is highly appropriate to the bombast favoured by Il Duce.

And therein lies the movie’s real strength. Because if, by the end, you somehow haven’t already realised that this is a film which is as much about the present (and, one fears, the future) as it’s about the past, then the final scenes, with Mussolini figlio insanely parroting his father’s ludicrously hysterical oratory, are a chilling reminder of the policies as well as the performing style of Italy’s current leader.

Author: Geoff Andrew 2009-05-19 16:48:09

Time Out Online Cannes Film Festival 2009