VINCERE

SELECTED PRESS

Vincere

19 May, 2009 | By Lee Marshall

Dir: Marco Bellocchio. Italy-France. 2008. 128 mins.

Veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio delivers his most commercial

feature to date in this artsy melodrama about Ida Dalser, the mother of the

only illegitimate child notorious womaniser Benito Mussolini ever

acknowledged. It’s a curious but rousingly cinematic work that for all its

flashy stylistic quirks is at heart as old-fashioned as its surging

orchestral score. As a study of the personal tensions behind Italian

history’s grand events, Vincere lacks the sensitivity of the director’s Aldo

Moro kidnapping drama Buongiorno Notte; but as a stirring portrait of a

woman wronged, it delivers the emotional goods.

Few of Bellocchio’s films have received more than the most cursory arthouse

runs outside of Italy, although this could end up being a partial exception.

In Italy, where 01 Distribution releases Vincere on May 20, the film’s

Cannes competition slot and the all-out performances of local favourites

Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi as Dalser and Mussolini should

guarantee a solid run.

Ida Dalser merits only eight lines in Denis Mack Smith’s definitive English

biography of Mussolini, but in Italy she has been the subject of at least

two books and a TV documentary. She and Mussolini began their liaison in

1914 when she was a well-to-do beauty salon owner and he was an

impoverished

firebrand socialist agitator. In November 1915 she gave birth to a boy, also

named Benito, who Mussolini initially recognised as his son. A year later,

however, he married his other main squeeze, Rachele Guidi (who was the

daughter of his father’s mistress), and as he rose to power he set about

rewriting his left-wing past – and repudiating Ida and her son.

Bellocchio is good at creating atmosphere, and the first part of the film,

set in an oppressive Milan, is a deft and breathless crescendo of scenes and

inserts (including footage from newsreels and retro typographical

flourishes) that establish the budding dictator’s fiery nature, his radical

politics, and (in some steamy but not explicit couplings) the sexual passion

that unites him to his mistress. The director lays his cards on the table by

showing Mussolini’s marriage to Dalser – a rumour that has never been

proven, though like most of its proponents, Bellocchio would claim that this

is because Il Duce and his henchmen made sure that all the evidence was

destroyed.

Back in her home town as Mussolini strutted his way to top office in 1923

and living with her brother and sister-in-law, Ida is kept under virtual

house arrest by the local Fascists, and after writing an increasingly

desperate series of letters to political and religious authorities, is

committed to an asylum. Watched over by a stern sisterhood of nuns, she

loses custody over her son and sees her increasingly shrill letters ignored,

or never delivered. Things go little better for young Benito.

Carlo Crivelli’s swelling orchestral score – kept high in the mix throughout

– gives the film a symphonic quality that is reinforced by an

impressionistic montage of contemporary silent films, newsreel footage,

desaturated tableaux featuring asylum inmates and overlaid oncreen Fascist

slogans. Bellocchio’s directorial inventiveness – undimmed even after 35

years in the business – helps to paper over some of the more glaring

chronological cracks in the story, especially in the later part (where the

director has the neat idea of casting Timi, who played the young Mussolini,

as the dictator’s grown-up son).

In the end, though, it’s Mezzogiorno’s sympathetic and unrestrained

performance as a woman who was one of history’s victims that gives an

auteur’s firework display its emotional heft.

Vincere (Italy-France)

By JAY WEISSBERG

Momentous events require suitably powerful storytelling, which vet helmer

Marco Bellocchio delivers in "Vincere," the little-known story of Benito

Mussolini's ill-fated first wife and son. Conceived as grand opera set

inside delineated space, it's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of

staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal

tale or the ramifications of history. Structurally and tonally, the pic

opens like "Gotterdammerung" and moves to the more ruminative "Siegfried,"

which means auds might feel the last quarter loses steam, but the arthouse

crowd will still flock, at home and abroad.

That's partly due to an unquestionably great story, which only recently come

to light. Opening shifts between Milan, 1914, and Trent, 1907, the years

when Mussolini (Filippo Timi) was a Socialist union organizer loudly

asserting God's nonexistence. Following a fleeting meeting in Trent, the

beautiful Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) rekindles her fascination with

the bold rabble-rouser on the eve of World War I, when Mussolini switches

sides and goes from pacifist to hawk.

Ida's attraction to the demagogue is palpable -- where she's hungry for his

larger-than-life personality, he's positively voracious for power. During

their forceful sex scenes, Mussolini keeps his eyes fixed forward, as if

he's pounding the future itself to break through his fears of mediocrity.

When Ida sells all her possessions to fund her lover's new newspaper, the

rise of Fascism is set into play. Bellocchio stages one of his most stunning

scenes as Mussolini incites a riot in a cinema between pro- and antiwar

partisans, accompanied visually by newsreels from the battlefield and by the

piano accompanist's bellicose scoring.

By 1915, Ida had a son, Benito Albino Mussolini, and a still-missing

marriage certificate, but soon she learns her husband has married Rachele

Guidi (Michela Cescon). From then on, Mussolini distances himself from Ida,

and ensures she and her son are kept away. At first subjected to near house

arrest at her sister's home, Ida is then thrown into an insane asylum, where

she furiously writes to Mussolini, the Pope and others demanding her

marriage be recognized.

Bellocchio convincingly imagines Ida as a woman obsessed nearly to the point

of lunacy, but she's also completely aware of what she's doing. Her madness

becomes both foolhardy and tragic; without minimizing Mussolini's pomposity

or headlong grasp for power at all costs, Bellocchio refuses to demonize the

root of Ida's obsession.

In political terms, the script is keen to present Il Duce as a man

strikingly devoid of a moral compass. Bellocchio makes Mussolini's alliance

with the Vatican particularly clear, and shows how his move from vocal

atheist to papal supporter ensured both his jettisoning of Ida and his grip

on the reins of government. Pic's title, the imperative form of "Victory,"

comes from Il Duce's rousing speeches, geared to mobilize the public to war.

The direction he'll be taking the country is presciently illustrated by a

column of blind classmates, conceived as a choral interlude, which

references the famed parable of the blind leading the blind as well as John

Singer Sargent's haunting war masterpiece "Gassed." Rarely has actuality

footage been used so superbly, not merely for period flavor but as integral

to the storyline: Once Mussolini renounces Ida, he's only seen as she sees

him, through newsreels.

While the history is fascinating, it's the film's style that takes the

breath away. Bellocchio sets up his scenes like acts from an opera,

alternately theatrical, spectacular, intimate and resounding. Blasts of

oratorio, insistent texts overlaid on images, even thunder and lightning

become tools containing all the "unnatural" excesses of opera: The full

import is conveyed as rightfully larger-than-life.

Both Mezzogiorno and Timi are perfectly cast. He's got Il Duce's

grandstanding down pat, yet Timi's Mussolini is also frighteningly human.

Mezzogiorno, moving and pathetic, pairs him beautifully: Her Ida is

cultivated (as opposed to Rachele's coarse peasant accent) and intelligent,

a woman battered by her brush with unfettered power.

Carlo Crivelli's music is a tour-de-force -- it's been a long time since

this kind of orchestration has been so well used. Sweeping and bold, it

harks back to some of the grand compositions of Hollywood's golden age, yet

there isn't a whiff of the old-fashioned in its power to thrill.

War and whimsy in Cannes

A film about Il Duce's first marriage is a surprise hit - but Alain Resnais's comedy

remains an acquired taste, says Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian, Thursday 21 May 2009

This year's Cannes has been a festival of star names and old stagers. The missiles from these

big guns have been of varying size and effective force. Of the four former Palme winners this

year, Tarantino has launched a big self-important dud with his Inglourious Basterds (reviewed

in news section); Lars von Trier's Antichrist was a vicious arthouse tease; Campion's John

Keats film Bright Star was outstanding - for my money, one of the best in competition; and

Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, starring the great Eric Cantona himself, has been an absolute

triumph here, whatever misgivings I might have about the ending. The film puts Loach in line

for his first box-office hit since Kes, possibly even a worldwide smash. The Premiership is

our version of Hollywood: a star system with huge value in every country in the world except

the US - and even there this film is likely to do well. Loach's life-long love of football has

paid off.

One of the biggest hits, and certainly the most unexpected, has been Marco Bellocchio's

Vincere, the secret history of Mussolini's first wife Ida and son Benito Albino, whose

existences were brutally suppressed by Il Duce and in his fascist authorities. Ida is

played as an all-consuming fireball of passion and rage by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, while

Filippo Timi is outstanding as the young Mussolini, the bull-necked and pop-eyed

prophet of his own future greatness. When Mussolini ascends to public prominence,

visible only on newsreel-movie screens, Timi goes on to play his own son; this is a great

coup.

Many thought that Bellocchio was a bit of an extinct volcano, but the director has a huge

amount of molten lava left in him. Did he take some inspiration from the new generation

of Italian directors - Paolo Sorrentino, for instance? Maybe. He has certainly punched

out a dynamic film, a wild operatic drama with an exhilarating orchestral score; the tide

of melodramatic hysteria runs parallel to that whipped up by Italian fascism and war-

fever at the beginning of the last century. Vincere speaks to modern Italy, where

Mussolini's memory is tolerated and where macho leaders are still venerated - although,

as Silvio Berlusconi has discovered, wronged wives still don't go quietly.

(…)

Bellocchio Exposes Mussolini’s Dirty Little Secret in “Vincere”

by Brian Brooks (May 20, 2009) Bellocchio Exposes Mussolini’s Dirty Little Secret in “Vincere”

Almost a century on, Italy is acknowledging the tragic stories behind one of the 20th century’s most notorious leaders in director Marco Bellocchio’s Cannes competition film,

“Vincere.”

Benito Mussolini hid a secret family througout his quest for power and fascist reign in Italy. Il Duce had a wife and son he later denied and had committed. Ida Dalser (Giovanna

Mezzogiorno) met Mussolini in Milan when he was the young Socialist editor of Avanti! So

taken by the dynamic Mussolini (Filippo Timi) she sold everything she had, including a successful beauty parlor in Milan, to finance Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper he founded after

being expelled by the Socialists, and a central component of his forthcoming Fascist Party.

After WWI erupts, he enlists in the Army and disappears. Ida eventually finds him again in a

military hospital and he is tended to by Rachele, whom he has just married. She continues to

pursue Mussolini, but is eventually forced into an insane asylum where she is tortured and

dies. Their son, Mussolini’s first born, also falls to a similar fate, dying at age 26 in an asylum.

“Ida is a woman who fell madly in love with this man who shared her ideals,” said Bellocchio in Cannes Tuesday. “When he cast her aside, she became a tragic figure in history.”

Bellocchio said she naturally became enraged with Mussolini who she became obsessed

over and hated simultaneously. Tidbits of their relationship are preserved in documents, but

many details are missing, but Bellocchio came across information by chance during production.

“There’s a scene where Ida takes out a gun with a single bullet and told her son, ‘this is a bullet and it’s for your father’s heart.’ A village woman who knew Ida told us this story, so we

added it to the story.”

Mezzogiorno said the most challenging thing for her was to not portray Ida in a way that was

her fate in history, but to emphasize her contradictions. “Personally, the major difficulty I

found was that I shouldn’t make the story of this woman as a mad woman - that would’ve

been easy. I had to emphasize her contradictions. She was modern, even feminist, but she sacrificed everything for this man.”

Mezzogiorno also said the production wasn’t a simple undertaking. “I didn’t have a single easy day in the shoot. Every single day was extremely tough and complex.”