Vincere

By turns a critique of cinema’s myth-making power and a catalogue of its seductive pleasures, Vincere follows the little-discussed story of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the mysterious first wife of Benito Mussolini. As played here by Filippo Timi, the young Mussolini is a figure of brooding intensity and ego. The film opens right before WWI, with Mussolini issuing one of his famous challenges to God’s existence. He would stand before a crowd of predominantly Catholic Italian officials and claim that if the Lord did not strike him dead within five minutes, it proved his absence. Such bravado draws Dalser, a bold woman in her own right, and the two begin an affair whose passion quickly spills over into Mussolini’s burgeoning political career. But after their marriage and the birth of their son, Benito Albino (Fabrizio Costella), Mussolini abandons her and marries his first “official” wife, Rachele (Michela Cescon). Furious, Dalser vows to publically contend that she is Mussolini’s true spouse. But Mussolini’s increasingly repressive Fascist government quickly pounces, destroying any documentation of the marriage and eventually sending Dalser to a mental institution and Benito Albino to an orphanage.

In perhaps the smartest move in director Marco Bellocchio and Daniela Ceselli’s screenplay, Mussolini disappears from the film once Dalser begins to accuse him of infidelities. Or rather, his flesh-and-blood presence disappears. His image, on the other hand, remains a constant and dominating presence: framed pictures in offices; stern-faced marble busts; and, most crucially, actual film footage of Mussolini glowering and rallying the country with hyper-nationalist rhetoric. Bellocchio casts an ambivalent eye toward the flickering movie screens that constantly project Mussolini before the Italian people, hinting at the way in which cinema can be complicit in the transformation of a cruel bully into a powerful tyrant. Unseen yet ever-present, Mussolini floats through the film like a malevolent spirit, his poisonous visage at once haunting Dalser and feeding her obsession to be recognized as his lawful spouse. This complicated double-bind—to be at once enraged with and hypnotized by a monstrous ruler—lies at the heart of Bellocchio’s project, though one wishes he had grappled with its implications somewhat more forcefully, rather than letting it the ambiguity hang teasingly in the air.

This is partly due to the fact that, in many ways, Vincere is a straightforward melodrama, enhanced—and, to a certain extent, complicated—by the operatic pitch that Bellocchio sets throughout the film. From Carlo Crivelli full-bodied score to cinematographer’s Daniele Ciprì’s rich use of shadows and smoke, Vincere remains unafraid of stylistic boldness, if not occasional excess, to match the emotions of its intensely suffering protagonist. The results are often entrancing. The sight of Dalser throwing undelivered letters to her son against the wind as heavy snow swirls before an ink-black sky showcases Bellocchio’s gift for strikingly expressionistic composition.

                                            Matt Connolly