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 Mussolini’s hidden first wife, Ida Dalser, also investigates the phenomenon of mass hysteria. By analogizing Italy’s 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 prodigy—still innovating cinema, just as when his 1967 debut Fist in the Pocket linked him with the phenomenal young imagist Bernardo Bertolucci. Vincere continues Bellocchio’s fascination with how individual psychology manifests itself in family and social relations, reflected in Italy’s religious and political culture. Ida Dalser’s professed marriage and bearing of a son by Mussolini discloses private passion and madness that penetrates national history; it’s a radical effort, especially for today’s 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 destiny—while defying the existence of God—before a theology conference. This sequence is both folkloric and erotic. Filippo Timi’s electrifying impersonation of a dark-haired, magnetic aspirant and then as the dictator’s adult bastard son, connects with Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s fanatical Ida. The Mussolini she desires, who we see through her mind’s 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 one’s consciousness.

As Mussolini advances his political career (Ida sells all her possessions to finance his journal Del Popolo d’Italia—Italian 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 Bellocchio’s remarkable experiential panorama: It chronicles Ida and Mussolini’s tryst while capturing the churning spirit of the times.

These montages pinpoint the excitement and terror of physical and political passion; Ida’s ardor is as unfathomable as political ideology. Bellocchio’s previous masterpiece, Good Morning Night (a trenchant analysis of the Red Brigade’s 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 Italy’s cultural propensity toward religious sentiment.

Bellocchio always lays out the complex (sometimes contradictory) ideas apparent in Italian habit and tradition—through details like the similar cowls of nurses and nuns, the social frenzy in Ida’s flapper-era demeanor, the tribal aggression in Mussolini’s arrogance. Bellocchio does this swiftly, wittily—as when juxtaposing Ida and a silent film icon of Mariolatry—and more meaningfully than last year’s over-rushed yet attenuated, TV-style storytelling in Il Divo. Cinematographer Daniele Cipri gives the dual saga of Ida and Italy’s l’amour fou dramatic, in fact operatic, atmosphere.

Vincere’s music score is always exultant, yet Bellocchio stages chanting crowds and impassioned outbursts for their inner music. This surge of emotion proves Vincere’s cultural authenticity. The style recalls the Rosie Perez dance that opens Do the Right Thing—expressing vital and uncorrupted private and social tension—and Evita, the faux-political operetta, which intended this same effect but lacked Bellocchio’s 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 Mussolini’s fighting a calamitous duel to Ida’s feminine travail in mental institutions and her separation from her child—all are conveyed through poetic, memorable images like Ida tossing letters to her son during a snowfall. They evoke cinema’s great l’amour fou melodramas—from Visconti’s Senso to Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H., yet transcend melodrama’s usual apolitical nature. Revealing a nation’s unconscious passion is Ida’s great victory—and Bellocchio’s.