•
Rating: Ignazio La Russa from the stage at a rally in Milan of "Maggioranza Silenziosa", an anti-communist committee that included a motley crew of people: Christian Democrats, liberals, even monarchists; thus, with footage from an actual rally, begins Marco Bellocchio's film, which then continues with images of urban guerrilla warfare as the opening credits roll, and again lingers on the funeral of Feltrinelli...
Bizanti (Volonté) is the editor of "Il Giornale", a corporate newspaper that uses news for political purposes in a socio-economic context like that of Italy (it is 1972, the real newspaper "Il Giornale" would be founded by Indro Montanelli in 1974) where the various opposing political extremisms also had a fundamental weight in parliamentary political choices and constituted ambiguous "balance points" for the economic-bourgeois power.
The story of the film is by Sergio Donati, who was also supposed to direct it; Bellocchio later took over and was helped in the screenplay by Goffredo Fofi; overall, the film perhaps suffers from not being Bellocchio's original subject, as was the case for his early films: "I pugni in tasca" and "La Cina è vicina", certainly more brilliant and original from an aesthetic and authorial point of view.
What shifts everything to a different plane is Volonté's performance, which manages to give the film a tone, it is the glue that holds the different levels together: partial and political journalism, politics in general, social issues, etc., in a well-defined context.
Distancing myself from the more common yet valid and correct reflections made by others on the film in question, I would like to focus on a secondary detail, which in my opinion holds fundamental importance for understanding Italy of that time and of today.
I revisit Pasolini's writings from the period and rewatch the first images of the film, where La Russa shouts at the rally; his hair is long, as is his beard. Seen in a social center with some companions, he could have been mistaken for someone on the left in that context; it is in these images (which for me are hallucinatory looking back at them) that we finally see the emergence of what Pasolini identified as cultural homogeneity and the anthropological change (in manners, but even in the facial features) of the Italians; while just a few years earlier one could recognize and distinguish a young fascist from a young communist just by looking at them, now (in 1972) one can no longer do so, and today (in 2011) it is completely absurd; the concept of right and left no longer even exists, everything is a single politically homogenized monolith, democratically and only formally opposed; in those first images, which for me contain a sense of revelation, lies much of the greatness of this film.
Loading comments slowly
