Marco Bellocchio
Il traditore

“This film left me a bit disappointed.” This review was about to start like this, I was about to say that the actors are gigantic, that the historical-journalistic care is excellent, but it lacks an insightful reading, a watermark that indicates the author's perspective on already well-known facts.

Then I had a flash: there's Tommaso Buscetta – after extradition and the self-thwarted suicide attempt – finally being brought to the prosecutor's office to talk to Giovanni Falcone. But the music is not dramatic at all; it's light, comedic I'd say. Then I reconsidered the long trial sequences: farcical, a kind of dialect theatre with all sorts of insults, laughable skits, verbal brawls. Or again, the moment of the Capaci massacre: images of affiliates popping champagne bottles and throwing insults in dialect, all swaggering. Or Buscetta in prison clearing out everyone to sleep with his whore of the day, as Contorno remembers smiling before going to sleep, in the cell he shares with the protagonist.

This is Bellocchio's reading. We know the story, there’s little to add about Cosa Nostra and the maxi trials of those years. But there was (and still is) to decide on the tone with which to talk about mafia, just as with camorra (and some famous series fall within this methodological discussion, but maybe they're forgetting it). The choice of the great filmmaker is radical: his is an anti-epic narrative, anti-heroic, anti-romantic; it is comedic, frivolous, clownish. It’s a radical and risky decision that alone makes it a memorable film.

The same Masino is anything but a great man. The title is the first warning. He is a simple soldier, who in the face of the prospect of no longer being able to sleep with his wife, understands that it’s better to tell the truth. He is someone who doesn't know how to reinvent a life, a job; he relies on the state and his wife, sings karaoke, his dream is to die in his bed, even if he says he’s not afraid of anything. He plans his future as soon as the opportunity arises. Yet, compared to his “colleagues,” he's almost a great philosopher. They know his weaknesses, they attack him on a personal level, while he makes it a matter of principles, saying that those from Corleone have exaggerated, killing women and children without pity. While before there were “values” (the digression on his first career elimination target is another almost comedic skit that says a lot about mafia paradoxes). But Falcone immediately unmasks him: let's stop saying that the Cosa Nostra “of before” had values. And that's quite a sharp blow to cinema about the mafia (see more).

The disappointment I was harboring was the daughter of an (unhealthy) habit to cinema about mobsters in which tension and horror are taken to the extreme, a carnage to immerse in, a world smudged with blood. But that is the cinema (and let it be blessed) born from Coppola’s Godfather and its many imitators. Here too, there is horror, but it is given in absentia, through mostly emotional contrasts, through the derailments of the humanity of these killers, rather than through visually horrific sequences.

It’s more sensible to reason about a comparison with Sorrentino’s Il Divo, where the horror lurks in the air but is equally detracted. However, there is an inescapable difference that disrupts this parallelism: in the stories of Buscetta, Riina, Calò, and associates, we will never find speeches like Andreotti's memorable one (“Perpetuate evil to guarantee good”). We won’t find them because these are small, ignorant men, simply hungry for money or power. So there isn't much to argue. It's Buscetta's truth against that of Calò, Riina, and so on. Each one plays at denying others' words, without additional elements, without corollaries. They say: “I do not know this man.” They are deeply ignorant and stubborn.

The spirit of this film is captured fully when it is Contorno testifying. He tells everything in a tight Sicilian dialect, the lawyers don't understand and protest. Then he gets angry, saying he doesn't know Italian. And if they don’t like it, he stops talking altogether. This is the stature of Cosa Nostra’s men (comedic, in the classical sense of the term: despicable characters deserve a ridiculous, low style).

Riina is a worm, paralyzed by his thirst for power. His constant machinations make him clumsy; he doesn't react, he doesn’t give the enemy satisfaction by responding in kind. Again, the horror of what he accomplished (or rather, had accomplished) looms implicitly over his shoulders, but the person himself is slimy, indeed, insignificant. These are nobodies, brains in decay that make their greatest flaw (the lack of compassion) their tool to achieve success, to survive like tigers in the mafia jungle. But in the civil society, they are subhuman monkeys.

And this is the truly significant legacy (and extremely difficult to sustain within the economy of a film, because cinema is fascination, attraction even towards horror, a taste for evil. We are in the era of evil heroes, like Breaking Bad, like Gomorra, and it is completely normal that it is so. Here, instead, we have an anti-heroic hero fighting anti-epic enemies, a war between larvae), I was saying that this is the fundamental legacy of Bellocchio’s work: to give them the portrait they deserve.