Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2009, 128 mins
Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi
Vincere has been hailed as a comeback by veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio, but in truth, he's never been away. It's just that his brand of political cinema as seen through the prism of personal melodrama has been out of fashion for some time. But in the era of Berlusconi, a provocative drama about Mussolini, an extraordinarily ruthless leader with formidable control of the media, is bound to generate interest outside the small circle of Bellocchio's admirers. And furthermore, it's a film that concentrates on Mussolini's spurned wife and her attempts to gain official recognition, a story that has uncanny parallels with events in Berlusconi's own life.
Ida Dalser is drawn to the charismatic, church-baiting journalist and Socialist that Mussolini was in his youth. She becomes his lover and bears him a son. But as his career progresses, he becomes protective of his image and abandons her for another woman. Ida becomes an irritant, and later, when she campaigns against him, a political obstacle. She's separated from her son and incarcerated in a mental institution.
As such, her trajectory from complete adoration to anger and sense of betrayal mirrors the Italian population's own experience of Mussolini. Bellocchio has elected to tell this story in two different ways: firstly, in a grand, operatic manner, the narrative flowing like a flash-flood of emotion, and secondly, punctuating this narrative with contemporary newsreel and inserts designed to imitate the silent cinema of the time. The result is a ferociously Brechtian take on a gripping tale; the audience is caught up in the turmoil of Ida's life, but constantly pulled up short by set pieces designed to knock us into awareness. As when Ida wanders into a cinema full of men raising Fascist salutes and her face is caught in the projector beam – she faces them alone but, for a moment, her image eclipses that of their leader. It's like a Kino fist thrown by Visconti.
Paradoxically, the crucial idea thrown up by this most theatrical of films is that, under a ruthless regime, everyone must become an actor, hiding their true self under a facade in order to survive. Ida, of course, refuses to act; instead, taking a leaf from the existentialists, she “acts”, making her whole life into a form of protest. Just as this film is its own act of protest, a cinematic call to arms. And one can't help admiring its confidence – its title is Vincere, “to win”.
Kelly Reichardt, 2008, USA, 80 mins
Cast: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Walter Dalton
Just as Francois Truffaut thought there was “a certain incompatibility” between Britain and cinema, so I’m beginning to think the same applies to the US Indie. Kelly Reichardt’s latest has been celebrated to the point of hysteria by North American critics ever since its Cannes debut. Yet its conspicuous absence from the Oscar nominees reveals just how far mainstream tastes and critical fashion have diverged over the last few years.
The reason for Wendy and Lucy’s warm reception is obvious; here is the same kind of art house minimalism practised by the Iranians and the Europeans except now from a homegrown source. Furthermore, the story’s thin premise revolves around a homeless woman losing her dog.
Check Neo-Realism (think Umberto D with a sex change).
Check sympathetic portrait of working class.
Check basis on which to reflect on modern America.
The result, rather like Reichardt’s previous feature Old Joy, is a Hallmark TV movie for the Marxist club, a sentimental journey for 40-something inner hippies who want one last chance to rattle their sabres at George Bush.
The clue is in the casting. Our poor vagrant is Michelle Williams, looking a little pale with tomboyish cropped hair. The very image of the geeky, wannabe Beatnik, middle-class audience that will indulge this film. Reichardt might have got away with this if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary opening scene where the protagonist confronts a group of genuinely credible vagabonds round an open fire. Among them is a chubby, pierced girl whose every gesture and phrase feels authentic to someone living off their wits. The movie should have been based around her, but the target audience might have found her a little more difficult to identify with. So, instead, we’re left to moon around with one of the most irritating and ineffectual characters in recent memory.
Her helplessness in the face of intransigent authority appeals to those who wish to see the poor as merely victims of poverty. But a comparison with the Dardenne Brothers’ The Silence of Lorna (2008) shows how superficial a response this is. In that film, the protagonist is an immigrant facing extraordinarily demanding pressures – her partner’s drug addiction, illegal trafficking, violent abuse. But she meets these problems head-on because such a life makes one tough, adaptable, even mercenary. By contrast, the “wilting flower” played by Williams seems like an impossible fiction, a soft-focus take on an unremittingly harsh reality.
It’s not that Reichardt’s direction is without merit. She has an eye for faces and in-between places like gas stations, car parks and makeshift offices, through which she evokes the desolation of small-town America. Indeed, her visual sense is more acute here than in Old Joy, the disconnected location shots suggesting the fragmented lives of the inhabitants. But it’s all too slight.
Watching John Huston’s Fat City, another portrait of life on the American breadline, I couldn’t help remarking on the gulf of ambition between the two works. Fat City takes its own story of marginalised losers and fashions out of it a portrait of the human condition as well as a state-of-the-nation address. But the scope of Wendy and Lucy feels as small as the crisis facing the protagonist, as limited as her ability to achieve anything - the result is a bite-sized vignette, a big slice of nothing. If we want to see the modern US Indie as the renaissance of that ‘70s spirit, then we have to ask why movies from that time still seem more trenchant about the world we’re living in today.
Regarded by the Ministry of Information as one of the finest propaganda films made during the war, Western Approaches is nevertheless a film more noted for the difficulty of its production than for its aesthetic quality. Its chief attribute is the beautiful cinematography by Jack Cardiff, here using a combination of three-strip Technicolor for interiors and the newly-devised Monopack system for location work. The Crown Unit requested colour film because it added a depth and shape to the sea that black-and-white couldn’t capture. Technicolor was rare enough in British cinema at the time, but for it to be used on such an ambitious project, with footage shot at sea in all weather conditions, makes the achievement all the more remarkable. Furthermore, the film crew were under genuine threat of U-boat attack; writer-director Pat Jackson has said that three boats were sunk on the convoy they filmed and that footage of a tanker on fire was taken, though ultimately never used.
The lifeboat sequences were, of necessity, filmed in calmer circumstances – often only about 500 yards out of Holyhead harbour. But Cardiff’s ingenuity is constant throughout – using night filters to bathe the ocean in cool blue moonlight, popping the camera in a crate that bobs through the water cascading into a sinking submarine.
However, though the technical qualities of the film are impressive, they should not obscure Western Approaches’ considerable impact as both human drama and gripping thriller. Jackson teases out an involving game of cat-and-mouse, cross-cutting between three ships, as the crew of a lifeboat desperately try to warn their rescuers of an enemy submarine (a story devised solely as a means for structuring the documentary footage, but which actually turned out to have precedents in fact.)
More importantly, the narrative, as originally devised, was going to centre on the Royal Navy, but in Jackson’s version, the emphasis falls on the merchant seamen themselves. Jackson revels in both their raw physical presence and their good-natured repartee, but he is also prepared to show the reality of these ordinary men under pressure when they come close to mutinying against their captain. This sympathy towards the sailors is carried over to all the characters in the film, including the crew of the U-boat.
Furthermore, Western Approaches adheres to all the conventions of the Crown Film Unit, particularly in the use of actual, serving sailors instead of professional actors – an approach that has arguably never been properly recognised by film historians as one that anticipates Italian Neo-Realism.
The first of four films that Lindsay Anderson considered Humphrey Jennings’ best work, Words For Battle was described by the filmmaker himself as being “about the Lincoln statue in Parliament Square”. This seems a curious definition for a documentary originally known as In England Now, which marries excerpts from major passages of English poetry and prose with footage of the contemporary, war-afflicted landscape, and in which Lincoln’s statue only appears at the very end. But it makes sense of the whole trajectory of the film and Jennings’ underlying theme.
In the first chapter, we descend from the rolling clouds - a Godlike, omniscient viewpoint looking down on England – into the fields and provincial towns, to eye-level with the local people. This movement is repeated in each succeeding passage – the camera watching from above as schoolchildren are evacuated before settling among them as they play on the river – until it reaches its climax with the people flocking past the Lincoln Statue. As narrator Laurence Olivier reaches the passage “The government of the people, by the people, and for the people” from the Gettysburg Address, the camera fixes on Big Ben before moving in amongst the passing tanks and then the bystanders on their way to work. Clearly, the sequence is meant to appeal to an American audience and act as a call to arms, but more importantly, it underlines Jennings’ belief in the ordinary man and woman as both the nation’s driving force and the rightful beneficiaries of victory in war. That’s why this paean to England ends not with Churchill, the bulwark of British Imperialism, but with a spokesman from the New World – and, not coincidentally, for a new order.