Salina Art Center

Marco Bellocchio was among the great Italian directors who emerged in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, creating films that were highly political (often Marxist), deliberately provoked bourgeois sensibilities, violent, irreverent, and explosive.  “Hip” American film critics (and youth involved in the anti-war movement) revered filmmakers like Lina Wertmüller, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and of course the godfather of them all, Federico Fellini.  But Marco Bellocchio was in the same pantheon, created art house masterpieces like Fist in His Pocket and China is Near, films that cinemaphiles had to see just as badly as the latest Jean-Luc Godard or Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  So it’s truly exciting to see a new film from this forgotten master appear in American theaters.  Vincere  (“To Win”) is Bellocchio at the top of his game, quite accessible but still utilizing some experimental techniques to tell the story of Ida Dalser, the mistress of Benito Mussolini, and mother of a son he won’t acknowledge.  Hers is a strange story, as unbelievable and disturbing as the infamous Fascist dictator to whom it’s tied; somehow, as strange as Dalser’s life was, and as unreliable as her testimony may be, in relation to the madness of Mussolini, it’s weirdly plausible.  The irony, though, is that it was Ida who was consigned to an asylum-by a man who belonged there himself, but instead led Italy into war alongside Adolf Hitler.  As played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Ida is passionate, empathetic, but always seems to walk a fine line between sanity and madness.  She truly loves Mussolini; she worships him, and her devotion is slightly crazed, but somehow not pathetic.  Despite her wrongheadedness, Dalser is heroic: her refusal to keep quiet about her relationship with Il Duce, and her demand that the world acknowledge her son as Mussolini’s as well, mark her as a doomed, tragic figure.  Her passionate intensity seems sympathetic, and certainly more honest, when compared to the way Mussolini tries to hide his “dirty laundry” while pursuing a hypocritical alliance with the Vatican in order to grasp ultimate power.  But Bellocchio and Mezzogiorno don’t make this an easy, smug attack on fascism.  We are never absolutely sure that Dalser isn’t truly insane, that she’s not really a delusional stalker who’s created this fantasy of a romance with Mussolini.  Bellocchio’s being coy when he has Filippo Timi, who plays Mussolini, also play the role of Dalser’s son as an adult.  But the “resemblance” might still be a product of Dalser’s emotionally disturbed imagination.  What’s more important to Bellocchio is not how true this story is-nothing’s more untrustworthy in cinema than the words “Based on a true story”-but how the personality of Mussolini could attract a person like Ida Dalser and similarly, mesmerize an entire nation into a state of savagery and near-suicidal bloodlust.  Vincere is a much-needed corrective to the depiction of Mussolini as a scowling, puffed-chest, incompetent buffoon.  It’s one thing to mock Hitler’s image, to de-fang the very real horror and disbelief he inspired, but Mussolini has never been taken as seriously as perhaps he should have been.  Certainly, most American viewers have never seen a serious, clinical depiction of Il Duce and how he managed to enthrall a country at a particular point in history.  Timi’s performance is quite astonishing in this regard, giving us a complex portrait of a megalomaniac with very human insecurities but a genuine-and dangerous-gift of demagoguery.  Vincere makes Dalser’s amour fou completely convincing, not comical, and gives viewers some insight into how tyrants win adoration and blind devotion.  In the ‘60’s, Bellocchio was a darling of the radical left, a cinematic rebel who shouted against the establishment.  Today, he doesn’t shout; but he’s even more persuasive, trusting in his newfound subtlety to make his points.  Vincere is a worthy capstone for the director’s remarkable career, a film that summarizes everything he’s wanted to say, but makes it fresh and contemporary even for viewers who aren’t familiar with his earlier work.  Just when it seems that filmmakers couldn’t possibly have anything new to add to the body of WWII cinema, a film like Vincere comes along to surprise us, showing audiences aspects of this well-dramatized historical period that astound us-and have so much to say about our own modern world.