Elio Petri
Todo Modo

With eyes turned down and intent on current events, I sense the odorless aroma of the occult that the mass media manage and have managed in the past to perpetuate upon me with an approach as daring as it is successful. Who today has the power to unmask, even for just a few moments, those who truly hold power? Who, do you know, today can interpret with great awareness and mastery, what is the media/acultural abomination to which we are subjected? In my opinion, no one. If to laugh at our political class we are forced to watch "Porta a Porta," or (even worse), entertain ourselves with the existential ablative calamities of the Florisian ring, then I believe that the times when it was said "politics is over" have been decaying for a while. And with them also the cinema that portrayed them in their baseness, their depravity and obsessions, their contradictions so harsh and yet evident.

'Todo Modo' is a declaration, pronounced aloud, recited with the awareness of one who knows they are along a demarcation line capable of separating a historical period torn apart by two world wars, compared to an innovative compromising de-evolution involving the erosion of every certainty: those same certainties that (coincidentally) also refer to the current events I was referring to earlier. The reasons why I believe this is a movie unparalleled in the past are nothing short of Kafkaesque, but perhaps, precisely because this work resides in a concept that usually leaves little initiative to those who get enmeshed in it with such voluptuousness, namely the ability to interpret scenic movements derived from the printed paper of a novel, by Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) in this case, for the sole purpose of giving the palate an improper, mysterious but damnably tangible taste. The incomprehensible must that my words exude concerning this masterpiece is simply attributable to the same sensations that the film branded on my (already in itself) not very healthy soul: the film begins and we are in 1976, year zero, where compromises are easily reached, especially in the Italian political realm; the DC and its members have their tasks, the PCI and its militants have equally much to employ themselves with. Elio Petri reads Sciascia's novel (from which the film's title is derived), and is literally stunned by it. He is planning other works at that time, some jaunts into theater, two or three trips around the peninsula for work reasons, and (as he reported several times in this regard) several sleepless hours in the middle of the night. One day fear is conquered, then a phone call to a "certain" Gian Maria Volonté, and the basic screenplay is decisively shaped. Volonté is astounded by the plot, remains in contact with the director and separates (as his visceral lifestyle) from everything and everyone, to enter his own self, in that corner of thought in which he, like only a few others (especially in the past), is particularly good at studying a human body, an expression, a thought painted on a face, even if dramatic or laughable. The result will be astonishing, like an experiment able to materialize only under certain given conditions.

But now let’s get to the heart. The scene is that of the same Italy in the mid-seventies contemporary to both, those leaden years, the ones in which Aldo Moro is the president of the Christian Democracy. An inexplicable epidemic takes over a crumbling peninsula, claiming many victims, all while the Christian Democratic party gathers for an annual session of "spiritual" exercise. Every single member who is an occult gear of the party participates, and it is masterfully here that Petri succeeds in communicating the greatness of his work: underground tunnels, rooms invisible to the surface and deliberately buried, this is the real setting, a scenery where each deputy confronts their spiritual stay in an unsettling atmosphere, partly clerical, partly claustrophobic. Intense carvaggiesque shadow play knows how to give each character that right tension, aimed at navigating the carved expressions of each performer. Narrow rooms, almost monastic, almost actual cells. A spiritual and psychic labyrinth, in which the only possible development is the loss of reason, in which the light of rationality dims to such an extent that it fires every party colleague against their own kind. To guide the lost flock, a rigid Marcello Mastroianni, a vicar-priest whose purpose is to organize and implement such exercises for spiritual purposes, whose only aim is to dominate those who are solely capable of dominating. The rest is pure irrationality. Thirst for power, frustration, and a spirit of egocentrism will radiate the air of the place where the party degenerates into its own form, its own sterile content. Inexplicable murders will bring tension to sink its claws into every already mal-thinking skull. A divine Gian Maria Volonté will torment himself to the point of paroxysm in order to deliver such transformations as to make any lookalike shudder, referring to Petri’s carefree decision, to make Volonté incarnate the figure of the "President" (Aldo Moro), so damningly realistic, so perfectly achieved, that the first two days of filming had to be trashed as the resemblance to the DC leader was so nauseating it risked causing more than a simple and eventual censorship (which turned out to be well-founded at the end of the filming, as well as upon the film's release in those few theaters it managed to land).

In the time during which events unfold with a grotesquely dramatic flair, every single performer (among which stand out the great performances of Ingrassia, a splendid Mariangela Melato, and a timeless Franco Citti) manages to absorb the weight, the disturbed and disturbing solemnity, and the invigorating profane language with which events bow to an evolution that manages to make the external epidemic forget itself, transporting the viewer to Dantean infernal circles never conceived before in the history of cinema for what is the metaphorical and surreal sense that the film is capable of emphasizing with such great ease. This is a unique film and (alas!) the last of its kind, precisely because at its release it triggered scenarios hardly quenchable, especially in that part of Italy that counts and which no longer wanted to hear about investigations on citizens above all suspicion, let alone working classes. Reflect then on the macabre snobbism that the (true) Christian Democrats of the era used to freeze the Petri-Volonté union, contrariwise (even if secretly!) greatly esteemed by the PCI. But this film goes beyond these principles that can be stained with ethics and/or spirit. I believe this is the only (and never again achievable) film that is able to use politics without wanting to talk about politics, namely the only work able to bizarrely distort the means, achieving the same end one would have without making the planned changes. A masterpiece, a seemingly nonsensical cabal that will actually know how to transport the mind into a trap without escape routes and ventilation, slowly subjected to the unavoidable and expressive notes of Ennio Morricone, who more than in a context like this had to know how to turn a movie within a movie, such as to be able to make the two universes so inexplicably symmetrical.

After this, there was only the slow, unstoppable passing of time, in which people began to prefer cocaine to culture, without even compromising between the two elements. No one ever again managed to give an image so surreally realistic of our country. Never again did anyone risk such a civilian and cultural collapse in the public and political opinion. This is one of the rare cases in which it was the victims who decided their fate without giving the unaware perpetrators a chance for redemption. This is the way to do things. This is true dedication.

This is Cinema.