WHEN YOU get into bed with a fascist, don’t be surprised if he steals all the covers. Vincere is the story of one of Benito Mussolini’s earliest victims: Ida Dalser (the lovely, monotonous Giovanna Mezzogiorno), a beautician who sacrificed everything for the rising politician (Filippo Timi). It’s thought that Dalser married Il Duce, and there’s evidence he acknowledged their child. After World War I, Mussolini remarried, and the luckless Dalser became a state secret. She was interned at a series of mental hospitals, and her son, also named Benito, was spirited away to captivity at a grim boy’s school. Director Marco Bellocchio focuses on Dalser’s side of the story: she’s swept away by the young street fighting man, who still had hair and a mustache. Before World War I, Mussolini is an editor, a lightning rod challenging God to strike him dead. Ida surrenders utterly: it’s a submission maybe not seen since In the Realm of the Senses. She sells her possessions and waits for him to arrive, nude.
Later, locked away in various madhouses, Ida can only watch him in newsreels, in dark rooms with hand-operated projectors and smoking carbon-arc lamps. There is Mussolini as we remember him: a beady-eyed, shaved gorilla in a wing collar, an aping, clowning thug, in one of history’s funniest hats. Was he, then, cinema itself? A seductive deception, no deeper than a screen? What he is in the film is a traitor to a woman who loves him, and a sellout to his principles: yesterday’s atheist sweetening up the pope and the king, both of whom he had once promised to kill.
Turbulent music heightens the operatic side of the story: Carlo Crivelli’s score sounds like Philip Glass and Bernard Herrmann having a fistfight while going over a waterfall. More turbulence: giant capital letters march across the screen, as does appropriated footage, including Chaplin’s The Kid. When you’re watching the story of a man and a woman who have separate and opposed obsessions, it’s difficult not to want to follow the story of the one who has the most interesting obsession. I must have been seduced by fascinating fascism myself, because I have to ask what is more compelling to watch: world domination or continued mourning for a kidnapped child?
For most of the film, Ida does two things. She writes letters, and she watches movies. When he’s grown, her son, Benito Albino Mussolini (also played by Timi), does imitations of his famous father to amuse his fellow students. (Good imitations, but John Lithgow in Buckaroo Banzai was better.) The urgency of Vincere (“to win”) is apparent. Some elements in Italy are trying to rehab the memory of the Man Who Made the Trains Run on Time. In the Brecht phrase, the bitch that bore him is in heat again. Locked up with Mezzogiorno’s occasionally interminable suffering, we’re left with another question: Whatever happened to Italian cinema? Images here remind us of the loss: the huge, arched madhouse window like the one in the jail in General Della Rovere, an untidy garden that reminds one of the Finzi-Continis’ estate, the capering madwomen escaped from Fellini … all these signal an Italian cinema that is, like Ida, looking backward instead of forward.
VINCERE (Unrated; 118 min.), directed Marco Bellocchio, written by Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli, photographed by Daniele Cipri and starring Giovanna Mezzogiorno, opens April 9 at Camera 3 in San Jose. (Read reviews on MovieTimes.com.)
