Wild Blood - Sanguepazzo: Familiar Fascists

Marco Tullio Giordana, director of what we saw in France as "Une Histoire Italienne," can do no wrong.  Maybe I'm too easy to please, but I found his six and a half hour (it was shown on European TV as a mini-series) La Meglio Gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003) addictive.  Now that he has so accurately portrayed Italian youth in the Sixties and beyond, he has trained his eye for period detail on the 30s and 40s, the heyday and then precipitous fall of Mussolini's Fascist state.

The settings are properly sumptuous when depicting the film world of Cinecitta, and appropriately squalid when showing the depths of fascist depravity as their world collapses during the Allied liberation of Italy.  Casting Monica Bellucci as Luisa Ferida and Luca Zingaretti as Osvaldo Valenti is inspired - I have no idea whether they resemble the real actors murdered (executed?) in the confused bloodletting at war's end, but Bellucci is credible as a no-nonsense actress, and Zingaretti looks like current Italian prime minister Berlusconi, who looks like il Duce Mussolini...

Director Giordana plays with such historical flashbacks both on screen and off.  In a two page interview in France's Liberation when "Sanguepazzo" was released, he draws parallels between the fascism of Italy's inter war period and the "fascism" of Berlusconi's "control of the Italian imagination" through his omnipresence in both politics and the TV industry, much of which he owns.  Giordana spends much time disparaging Italian TV (if our two weeks there recently can serve as corroboration, we would agree: almost no documentaries, almost exclusively 50s style variety shows with a maximum of buxom dancing girls).  Awful as it is, Giordano asserts that most Italians spend hours glued to it every evening.  Bread and circuses... it all started in Rome.

I guess "Wild Blood" will not be for everyone.  Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety after Wild Blood was screened at Cannes, says that "Giordana's surprisingly wet treatment adds nothing incisive or complex to the debates" about the behavior of Italian partisans during the war, or the current rise of the far right in Italian politics.  Too bad that Weissberg's is one of the few mainstream reviews in English currently available, so we'll have to await release in the English speaking world to get divergent opinions.

In the meantime, Wild Blood offers, in my opinion, a credible, nuanced, and dramatic picture of an era that is not all that far away.  Giordana knows his fellow citizens' foibles, and his depiction of Italians is probably timeless, though set in the 1940s.  And fascism, while it may no longer wear black or brown shirts, is still with us.  Here the fascists are not all monolithic monsters, and those who collaborate with them sometimes do so for less than ideological motivations.  Anyway, go see it, if for no other reason than to see Monica la Bellissima.

(Photo credit: Ocean Films, distributor in France)