Black Holiday

Set in Fascist Italy and focused around the internment of a young professor of law on a prison island, Black Holiday maintains an impressive ideological urgency and relevance. Inspector Rizzuto (Celi, excellent) attempts to 'contain' and control the renegade teacher through the most telling, 'civilised' and classist of methods, by wrapping him in privileges. And the professor (Merli), class-bound but initially blind to the implications of the fact, begins to succumb. The parameters of middle class compromise are very clearly drawn. The precision is admirable, the images spare; and if the hero of the film is the inarticulate Communist who dislocates the professor's essential complacency, its heart can be perceived in the owlish anarchist who remains rousingly defiant to the end.