Cannes. "Vincere"

By David Hudson on 05/19/2009

[Updated through 5/26]

"What's with the bookmakers at this year's festival?" asks Xan Brooks in the Guardian. "The latest odds have Marco Bellochio's 'Vincere' as favourite to win the Palme d'Or this Sunday, closely followed by Ang Lee's 'Taking Woodstock,' Brillante Mendoza's 'Kinatay' and Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon.' This despite the fact that the reviews for the first three are what diplomatic types refer to as 'mixed,' while reviews for 'The White Ribbon' are as yet non-existent (it doesn't screen until tomorrow). William Goldman was right: no one knows anything."

True, but maybe we'd better go ahead and take a look at this supposed frontrunner. Just in case.

This is Bellocchio's "most commercial feature to date," writes Lee Marshall, an "artsy melodrama about Ida Dalser, the mother of the only illegitimate child notorious womaniser Benito Mussolini ever acknowledged. It's a curious but rousingly cinematic work that for all its flashy stylistic quirks is at heart as old-fashioned as its surging orchestral score. As a study of the personal tensions behind Italian history's grand events, 'Vincere' lacks the sensitivity of the director's Aldo Moro kidnapping drama 'Buongiorno Notte'; but as a stirring portrait of a woman wronged, it delivers the emotional goods."

"Marco Bellocchio is no stranger to dividing critics and audiences with his films, and the highly anticipated 'Vincere' is unlikely to be an exception," writes Natasha Senjanovic in the Hollywood Reporter. "is true story begs the question, 'Why should we care about a woman in love with and driven mad by one of recent history's most brutal dictators?'... The damage done by Mussolini as he ruthlessly rose to power and became a bloodthirsty ruler in his quest for domination is so much greater than the two destroyed lives of 'Vincere' that the film simultaneously cancels the very empathy it evokes."

"Conceived as grand opera set inside delineated space, it's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history," argues Jay Weissberg in Variety. "Structurally and tonally, the pic opens like 'Götterdämmerung' and moves to the more ruminative 'Siegfried,' which means auds might feel the last quarter loses steam, but the arthouse crowd will still flock, at home and abroad."

Updates: "Mundane film-critic adjectives like 'operatic' and 'expressionistic' fail to convey the vivid sense of being steamrolled in your seat by the first hour's nunchuck intertitles (I swear one nearly took my head off), speed-demon pace, shrieking violins and silent-era performances." Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club: "As Mussolini, Filippo Timi evinces the fearless bravado of the young Nicolas Cage, which makes it startling to see him repeatedly upstaged by Giovanna Mezzogiorno's astonishingly feral work as Ida Dalser... Maybe I'm just a sucker for any historical drama that doesn't go plod plod plod, but so far 'Vincere' is easily my favorite film in Competition this year, despite being one of my least anticipated."

"The story itself, while fascinating and rooted in fact, is hardly packed with surprises," admits Geoff Andrew in Time Out London, "but what distinguishes 'Vincere' is the flair with which the tale is related. First, one should certainly mention the excellent lead performances of Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida and Filippo Timi as Mussolini. But even more impressive is Bellocchio's virtuosity in combining drama, archive footage, and music - not merely ]Riccardo Giagni's] thundering orchestral score but various existing works both classical and popular - to create a highly cinematic oratorio of enormous rhetorical force: a style, by the way, which is highly appropriate to the bombast favoured by Il Duce. And therein lies the movie's real strength. Because if, by the end, you somehow haven't already realised that this is a film which is as much about the present (and, one fears, the future) as it's about the past, then the final scenes, with Mussolini figlio insanely parroting his father's ludicrously hysterical oratory, are a chilling reminder of the policies as well as the performing style of Italy's current leader."

Cannes has video and audio from the press conference.

Update, 5/20: "If Giovanna Mezzogiorno wants to be Italy's answer to Angelina Jolie, 'Vincere' is her 'Changeling,' and how unfortunate," writes Alison Willmore.

IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks reports on the press conference.

Updates, 5/21: "Many thought that Bellocchio was a bit of an extinct volcano, but the director has a huge amount of molten lava left in him," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Did he take some inspiration from the new generation of Italian directors - Paolo Sorrentino, for instance? Maybe. He has certainly punched out a dynamic film, a wild operatic drama with an exhilarating orchestral score; the tide of melodramatic hysteria runs parallel to that whipped up by Italian fascism and war-fever at the beginning of the last century. 'Vincere' speaks to modern Italy, where Mussolini's memory is tolerated and where macho leaders are still venerated - although, as Silvio Berlusconi has discovered, wronged wives still don't go quietly."

And "Vincere" is Cineuropa's new "Film Focus."

"At 69, age has diminished none of Bellocchio's sting," writes LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, noting that "he opens his film with Mussolini the young socialist denying the existence of God and climaxes two hours later with the 1929 creation of the Papal State, in between revisiting all of his career-spanning concerns about the many faces of fascism and the hypocrisy of Catholic family values. The through line for Bellocchio is cinema itself, from an early scene in which fighting movie patrons become a sort of living newsreel, to the many archival film clips and propaganda slogans ingeniously worked into the body of the film. The history of 20th-century Italy emerges as a kind of grandly cinematic delusion, and 'Vincere' as a timely cautionary tale about despots who fancy themselves media barons - and vice versa."

Update, 5/26: "From the self-reflexively daring opening - Mussollini challenging god in order to prove none exists - Bellocchio is at his peak, with audacious mise-en-scene and inventive historical reflectio," writes Christoph Huber at La lectora provisoria. "Also a fantastic film using and deconstructing fascist aesthetics and, with archive material and inspired juxtapositions, the power of cinema itself."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 2009.

[Photo: "Vincere," Celluloid Dreams, 2009]

Tags: Cannes 2009, Filippo Timi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Italian Cinema, Marco Bellocchio