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| Director Marco Bellocchio |
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| The director on the set with Giovanna Mezzogiorno |
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| Ida Dalser |
VINCERE A Italy France (128 mi) 2009 d: Marco Bellochio
If I die who will remember me? —Ida Dalser
As ballsy a film as you’re going to see, at times showing the ferocity of spirit and matchless flamboyance of Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941), or Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), with a magnificent opening 45 minutes that feels like an assault to the senses, using archival footage with the assuredness of a documentary director like Terrence Davies in his recent cinematic essay Of Time and the City (2008), coming on the heels of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (Il divo: La spettacolare vita di Giulio Andreotti) (2008), sharing the same stylistic bravado, where instantly we are propelled smack dab in the middle of a precipitous moment in history, as a young Benito Mussolini is a trade union activist theatrically attempting to persuade a group of socialists that God really doesn’t exist, a meeting that ends in sheer pandemonium. Out of this darkness, mostly shot by Daniele Ciprí in the shadows of already darkened rooms, the film cuts to a few years later as the police are attacking Mussolini as a rabble rouser, where he is seen like a Keystone Cops episode running towards the camera through a cloud of smoke, followed shortly afterwards by the police. Later national troops are on his trail firing shots, where he conveniently slips into a warehouse under the protection of an unidentified young mystery woman that we may have seen before in the opening scene, who also happens to do some modeling in Milan, but soon without a word she is in the arms of Mussolini, later in his bed making love, eventually following him everywhere, a loyal admirer who seems to complete a transformative image of himself from man to icon, providing sensuality and passion, two sides of the same coin, where she becomes the ultimate metaphor for Mussolini seducing an entire nation. Moving back and forth in time with ease, with a screenplay by Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli, we meet the principal players, Filippo Timo who is fiercely dynamic as the young Mussolini, and Giovanna Mezzogiorno, daughter of the late lamented 70’s arthouse screen idol Vittorio Mezzogiorno, who couldn’t be more breathtakingly elegant as the aristocratic hairdresser Ida Dalser. This couple is marked by their sexual liberation, as Dalser in particular is used to showcasing her body as a model, while Mussolini is also known for flamboyant bodily gestures, with whirling eyes, chin thrust out, a protruding lower lip, with spread legs and hands on hips while puffing his chest out, where this physical dimension is able to attract people's attention and arouse the enthusiasm of the crowds, an integral part of his ascent to power. Mussolini eventually tries to convince the socialists to get off their asses and actually stand for something instead of remaining neutral, but when he insists on advocating war, he is thrown out of the party for his destructive influence. Time marches forward as scenes are accentuated by headlines boldly flashing across the screen, punctuated by Carlo Crivelli’s bombastic music, also accompanied by the pulsating energy of Phillip Glass, an emphatic, strikingly original use of music that drives home the exhilarating message of naked ambition and untapped raw power. The film is notably listed at #2 in 2009 from Cahiers du Cinema: Top Ten Lists 1951-2009, while winning four awards at the 2009 Chicago Film Festival, Best Actor (Filippo Timi), Best Actress (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), Best Director (Marco Bellocchio), and Best Cinematography (Daniele Ciprì), Chicago International Film Festival Winners.
Seemingly inseparable, as the two are in nearly every scene together, demonstrating a preoccupation with sex, power, and madness, the now pregnant Dalser is so taken by him that she sells her business, a beauty parlor, as well as her clothes, her jewelry, and all of her personal belongings in order to finance Mussolini’s transition from the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti to the founder of his own paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, a platform for his message of fascism. They marry and have a child, though onscreen Mussolini goes from standing naked on a hotel balcony envisioning a huge crowd in the empty square below to becoming the full-fledged leader of the country in just a few shots. As Italy marches off to war in WWI, one of the more inspired scenes is the image of a hospital ward of wounded soldiers where newsreel coverage of the war is shown on the walls, with Mussolini seen lying in his hospital bed as Giulio Antamoro’s passion play film about Jesus, CHRISTUS (1916), is projected onto a sheet above the patients, clearly identifying himself as a deity figure, a wonderful blend of cinema and reality thrust together in the same shot. When word of a wounded Mussolini is announced (from a training accident), Dalser visits him in the hospital as he is being nursed back to health by another woman who has just become his wife, Rachele Guidi (Michela Cescon), the daughter of his father’s mistress, a plain and ordinary woman who would bear him four more children. Dalser lashes out at her rival, demanding her rights as Mussolini’s true wife and the mother of his first-born son, only to be led away by force. This is the last time Dalser would ever see the man again, as by now he has denounced their marriage and denied her son is his. Without warning, the darkness of the opening scenes gives way to the light of day, as the fascists of Mussolini soon gain control of the Italian government, where Timo the actor is never seen again in the role, replaced by the real Il Duce as depicted in Luce newsreel footage (Istituto Luce) giving fevered speeches that send euphoric crowds into a nationalistic frenzy. One of the more vivid newsreel scenes is the operatic use of the music from Puccini’s Tosca, the ultimate betrayal opera, which underscores Mussolini forging an unholy alliance with the Pope by offering him his own Vatican City, using the church to legitimize his power, where this tenuous romantic liaison and its offspring became not just a secret embarrassment, but a political liability that needs to be extinguished. Ironic that Mussolini the atheist would subsequently renew his vows with his new wife through the church, a sign that he’s all but abandoned his original principles. What stands out is the tendency of fascist systems to suppress histories, both personal and national, while exploiting popular media to blind people of the truth, using cinema as the strongest propaganda weapon of the state. Until this film, most were likely not even aware of Ida Dalser, who was airbrushed out of history by the fascist dictator once he rose to power, erasing any “official” record of Ida Dalser and her son, but in 2005 Italian journalist Marco Zeni uncovered archival documents providing evidence of their marriage and the existence of his first-born son (Movie Review: Vincere), resulting in two books and a TV documentary, having profound relevance as efforts by the Italian right to rehabilitate Mussolini as a good family man who was occasionally misguided but essentially harmless led to the post-fascist National Alliance and The People of Freedom government of Silvio Berlusconi, including the ascension of neo-fascist parliamentarian Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter, where even today Italy has still not closed the fascist-era chapter of history.
The entire tone of the film shifts away from a Mussolini onscreen to an unseen Mussolini whose disturbing impact couldn’t be more pronounced due to his heavy-handed abandonment of Dalser and her son despite her claims she is his legitimate wife. Due to the political baggage this could potentially bring, their very existence needs to be suppressed, so she is sent to a tucked away rural estate of her brother for her son’s protection, as the family is under the watchful eyes of military surveillance, eventually kidnapping the ten-year old son, who she never sees again, while Dalser is sent to a mental institution, Venice’s San Clemente psychiatric hospital, where nuns are her jailers as she repeats her claims to deaf ears. Unfortunately, this storyline, although true, bears a similarity to the histrionics of Clint Eastwood’s recent Angelina Jolie vehicle in CHANGELING (2008), where both women resolutely repeat their claims with such certainty that the state’s only alternative is to discount the information as the rantings of a mad woman. While Mussolini himself was engaged in an unstoppable rise to power, Dalser was living through a long and just as unstoppable descent into hell, where she and her son were both made to rot in their solitudes, falling into oblivion, creating some of the more intimate and dark aspects of the human soul, accentuating the pain of Dalser’s tragic fate, which stands in stark contrast to Mussolini’s pathological indifference, hiding a perverse side of Mussolini’s character. Here the film lingers and slows somewhat captivated by her pathos, matching that of the helplessness of the nation, yet there continues to be highly expressive scenes, even as Dalser attempts to escape, crawling over the iron bars which go all the way up to the ceiling so there is no escape. There is a scene of her trapped in the darkness, stuck halfway up the iron bars, as a heavy snow falls outside, throwing letters through the bars that will never be delivered, an image that sticks in our minds where she is hopelessly forgotten. When they show Charlie Chaplin’s THE KID (1921) at the mental asylum, Dalser is beside herself with grief watching them snatch the Little Tramp’s kid away, but overwhelmed with joy when they are reunited. What’s not clear, at least in the movie, is whether she hallucinates the marriage shown onscreen or whether it actually happened, as no marriage certificate was ever found, but it would have been destroyed by fascist agents. Trapped and tortured, it’s clear the message inferred is that Dalser is completely sane while Mussolini’s insanity may well have done irreparable harm leading Italy into two lost world wars. But this film never projects that far, as the fascists control the police, who eventually keep both Dalser and her son Benito Albino (also played as an adult by Filippo Timo) in separate mental institutions where both eventually die under confinement. Mussolini’s regime, as part of the fascist playbook, often used psychiatric institutions to incarcerate and silence its opponents, where his historical significance in Italy is enormous, as the country to this day is still coming to grips with its profound impact, especially considering the similarities between Mussolini and the flamboyant performing style of Berlusconi today, but the personal tragedy of a nation’s leader in denial over his own offspring, imprisoning them instead, perfectly expressed by the developing insanity of his own son mimicking his father’s mannerisms as he delivers his speeches, to the delight of the other patients, becomes a highly theatrical Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions.
Note
While there is no greater martyred woman in the history of cinema than Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1929), with this film paralleling her imprisonment and endless sufferings, yet also lost in the forgotten annals of history was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of Mussolini in 1926 when an Irish women named Violet Gibson fired a pistol from point-blank range from within a crowd in Rome but only grazed his nose (Violet Gibson - The Irish woman who shot Benito Mussolini). Based on her background, the daughter of Lord Ashbourne, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Britain’s favorable alliance with Italy at the time (“Churchill Always Admired and Offered Peace to Mussolini”), she was subsequently locked inside a British mental hospital for the rest of her life.
Marco Bellocchio's Closet Picks - The Criterion Collection YouTube (2:57)
