Vincere
Vincere Directed by Marco Bellocchio [At IFC Center] Runtime: 128 min.
Marco Bellocchio does two things at once in Vincere: This story of Benito Mussolinis hidden first wife, Ida Dalser, also investigates the phenomenon of mass hysteria. By analogizing Italys relationship with its Fascist-era dictator with the plight of a spurned woman, Bellocchio gets deep inside the psychology of sexual obsession and the mystique of political charisma. That may sound tendentious but Vincere (which translates as win or vanquish) is a triumphant combination of personal and political filmmaking.
At age 70, Bellocchio remains a prodigystill innovating cinema, just as when his 1967 debut Fist in the Pocket linked him with the phenomenal young imagist Bernardo Bertolucci. Vincere continues Bellocchios fascination with how individual psychology manifests itself in family and social relations, reflected in Italys religious and political culture. Ida Dalsers professed marriage and bearing of a son by Mussolini discloses private passion and madness that penetrates national history; its a radical effort, especially for todays celebrity-intoxicated, yet shallowly politicized, media culture.
Bellocchio first explores social mythology: Ida meets Mussolini at a political rally in 1910, where the young Socialist firebrand asserts his destinywhile defying the existence of Godbefore a theology conference. This sequence is both folkloric and erotic. Filippo Timis electrifying impersonation of a dark-haired, magnetic aspirant and then as the dictators adult bastard son, connects with Giovanna Mezzogiornos fanatical Ida. The Mussolini she desires, who we see through her minds eye, is a figure of ferocious masculine leadership and will. (A later documentary image of the actual unhandsome, bullish Mussolini creates intentional dissonance.) Both characterizations are a heightened form of political agit prop; they sear ideas about seduction, lust and capitulation onto ones consciousness.
As Mussolini advances his political career (Ida sells all her possessions to finance his journal Del Popolo dItaliaItalian People), Bellocchio overlays vintage film clips, documentary montages and art graphics that convey the period as both living history and self-conscious spectacle. This layering of extra information is an inspired trope. Bellocchio achieves a heady balance of narrative distance, emotional spontaneity, kinetic thrill and political savvy. At one point the word AUDACITY (lifted from the graphics of a silent movie) fills the screen in rhythmed repetition. Not a mixed-media montage as in a Peter Greenaway installation, this visual collage is part of Bellocchios remarkable experiential panorama: It chronicles Ida and Mussolinis tryst while capturing the churning spirit of the times.
These montages pinpoint the excitement and terror of physical and political passion; Idas ardor is as unfathomable as political ideology. Bellocchios previous masterpiece, Good Morning Night (a trenchant analysis of the Red Brigades assassination of Italian PM Alberto Moro), exposed the hypocrisies of Communist fervor, and Vincere, equally uncanny, grasps the tumult and instability of patriotic zeal. When WWI begins, Mussolini is shown convalescing in an open-air army hospital where an outdoor film projection connects his messianic mania to Italys cultural propensity toward religious sentiment.
Bellocchio always lays out the complex (sometimes contradictory) ideas apparent in Italian habit and traditionthrough details like the similar cowls of nurses and nuns, the social frenzy in Idas flapper-era demeanor, the tribal aggression in Mussolinis arrogance. Bellocchio does this swiftly, wittilyas when juxtaposing Ida and a silent film icon of Mariolatryand more meaningfully than last years over-rushed yet attenuated, TV-style storytelling in Il Divo. Cinematographer Daniele Cipri gives the dual saga of Ida and Italys lamour fou dramatic, in fact operatic, atmosphere.
Vinceres music score is always exultant, yet Bellocchio stages chanting crowds and impassioned outbursts for their inner music. This surge of emotion proves Vinceres cultural authenticity. The style recalls the Rosie Perez dance that opens Do the Right Thingexpressing vital and uncorrupted private and social tensionand Evita, the faux-political operetta, which intended this same effect but lacked Bellocchios mastery. Bellocchio seizes on neurotic energy, whether of an unrequited love or a hoodwinked, ruined polity.
Vincere makes the leap from one to the other credible and powerful. The characters anguish articulates the depth of Italianate character, from Mussolinis fighting a calamitous duel to Idas feminine travail in mental institutions and her separation from her childall are conveyed through poetic, memorable images like Ida tossing letters to her son during a snowfall. They evoke cinemas great lamour fou melodramasfrom Viscontis Senso to Truffauts The Story of Adele H., yet transcend melodramas usual apolitical nature. Revealing a nations unconscious passion is Idas great victoryand Bellocchios.