Saturday, April 3, 2010

Vincere (Saturday, April 3, 2010) (27)

Vincere tells the story of Benito Mussolini and his relationship with an early mistress and their bastard son. It shows him rising from the Left as a demagogue journalist and then switching to the Right and gaining power. Along the way, he meets Ida Dalser, a young political radical, and the two fall madly in love with one another. The only problem was that Mussolini already has a wife and kids. As he rises up the power structure in Italy to become "Il Duce", Ida gets pregnant and has a son. He initially acknowledges the boy is his, but then turns around and locks her up in an insane asylum, claiming she's crazy to be speaking of their relationship.

Clearly the historical tale here is fascinating - and something that I did not know about before. Mussolini is known to have been a power-hungry moron, not unlike George W. Bush or Andrew Jackson. He was able to rule with an iron fist... but sometimes that fist would change its mind and contradict itself. I'm not totally sure that that part of his personality really came out in this film. (Imagine a film about W. where he was portrayed as a fearless, genius leader who had a direction and a goal - this would be super frustrating, no?).

The story itself, as a tragic, romantic tale is particularly operatic. A young 'prince' falls in love with a woman, while he is married, as he takes over the kingdom, he has to shed his past and scorns his lover and son. Once he becomes the king, he can erase both of them entirely. But the story is not the problem as much as the structure of the script. After about the middle of the second act, Mussolini becomes a phantom character. At first he's in every scene of the film, but then it turns to focus only on Ida and he, as Il Duce, is somewhere else off screen. This was particularly frustrating to me.

Director Marco Bellocchio does a lovely job using Russian Avante Garde techniques of stylized titles over plastic footage to transition from one segment to another. But all this style doesn't totally work in this film. Yes, much of the action is happening in the 1920s, when Russian filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein were making their masterpieces Man with the Movie Camera, Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but it feels rather out of context. (Like if there was a film set in Sweden in the 1950s and Jackson Pollock influenced the visual style). It looks really good, but I think it doesn't really add up to much of any significance.

The acting is nice, especially Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida, but the whole film never comes together all that well. I never totally understand why I should care about any of the characters. I certainly never feel much pity for Ida or any compassion for Mussolini (I think it's hard to feel much of anything for a demagogue- you either follow them or yo don't). I appreciate the effort here, but I don't particularly love it.

Stars: 2 of 4

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