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Rating:
Premise: I am about to review only the first half of the film because at the interval I decided to leave the theater to avoid wasting another hour of my life.
Already when entering the cinema, glancing at the poster, I saw "Rai Fiction" and began to foresee the worst, but in the end, taken by an unusual charge of hopeful optimism, I told myself: "well, you don’t always have to have these prejudices, by the law of large numbers they might occasionally do something good!" Well, that was not the case, indeed.
In theory, the film should be inspired by the eponymous and controversial book by Giampaolo Pansa, which in his historical essay deals with the misdeeds committed by certain factions of the partisan movement, listing crimes and executions that took place after liberation had already occurred, particularly regarding the so-called "Triangle of Death." The book, much contested by the Italian left, had the courage to re-examine what many still consider an untouchable myth, that of the resistance, highlighting that even this movement, as is inevitable when dealing with human beings, has its own dark side made up of purely political killings, vendettas, and the spirit of revenge. This, of course, without wanting to diminish or justify the crimes of the opposing side (which are now known to all), nor condemn the entire partisan movement, something that doesn’t seem to have been understood by a fair number of people who accused the book of revisionism or even of praising fascism and other such nonsense.
But let's talk about the film, if one can even call it that, in terms of quality and depth we are at the level of any of the pointless soap operas found on our local TV: embarrassing dialogues that seem like they were written by a child, phrases meant to be impactful that only manage to elicit pity, actors who cannot act, mediocre direction, and so on. And you intuit all this within the first 5 minutes of the film, so you can imagine with what spirit I faced the next 45 minutes, not helped by a theater with humidity and mugginess levels worthy of a tropical greenhouse, which certainly didn't improve my mood. Anyway, as the story progresses, one realizes that the main theme of the book is not even hinted at; the film is based on the usual cartoonish good/evil dualism with Germans who enjoy shooting children and killing everything that moves and is not Aryan. And since everyone knows that appearances also reflect one's moral qualities, the partisans are all good-looking, while when we see an SS officer it is immediately noticeable that he is unattractive, he even drools all over himself while eating, he's definitely a quintessential villain!
Still, the seconds, thank God, albeit veeeeeeery slowly (even Latin lessons didn’t drag on like this!), pass and after what seems like an eternity I see the word "interval" appear. At this point, I am undecided on what to do; after all, the money is already spent and having nothing else planned for the evening, I could endure a little longer until the end, hoping for even a minimal, though improbable, spike in quality (also because doing worse than what had been so far was practically impossible). But then a quick glance at the film guide was enough: upon seeing duration=126 minutes, I concluded that I could not endure another hour of agony without seriously endangering my mental health, so I decided to pack up, thus ending my ordeal.
This has never happened to me before, leaving a film halfway through, but this time I really cannot find a single redeeming feature, as far as I’m concerned, complete failure: avoid it like the plague!
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