Off The Shelf: Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night

Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio is, along with Francesco Rosi (Christ Stopped at Eboli, Three Brothers) and Ettore Scola (The Family, Unfair Competition), likely his country’s best living director. Vincere, his 2009 film, which opened commercially earlier this year in the U.S., is a powerful look at the early days of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi) and Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the loving and loyal wife he betrayed and later expunged from his personal (and the country’s) history. It's an upsetting tale of personal fascism and those Italian citizens, doctors, politicians and ordinary folk alike, who aided and abetted the dictator as he, in effect, erased the lives of Dalser and his son, Benito, whom he saw as inconvenient obstacles in his rapid rise to power.

Bellocchio has dipped into Italy’s turbulent history before but never more effectively than in his 2003 film Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) , which centers on the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, former Prime Minister and leader of the country’s Christian Democrat party, by the Red Brigades terrorist group. (Bellocchio had also directed a 1995 documentary, Broken Dream (Sogni infranti), on the subject of Moro’s kidnapping and murder.)

The Traitor: The Best Movie of 2020

Pierfrancesco Favino in The Traitor (Il traditore), directed by Marco Bellocchio. (Photo: Laura Siervi/Sony Pictures Classics)

The Traitor is a lush, big-boned, two-and-a-half-hour Italian Mafia epic, dense with characters, that transpires over the course of the last two decades of the twentieth century, with flashbacks to 1963 and 1974. It was released on this side of the Atlantic early last year and though it received good reviews, it didn’t make the splash it deserved to make, and by now it’s probably been largely forgotten. At least it opened here; the work of its director, Marco Bellocchio, often doesn’t. Bellocchio has been turning out movies since the mid-sixties, and often they’re astonishing, but outside Italy – or perhaps outside the European arthouse scene – he’s virtually unknown. He established a cerebral, visually daring, highly modernist style with his second and third feature-length pictures, Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China Is Near (1967), and his wit, his startlingly confident cinematic adventurousness and his left-wing politics begged comparisons with Godard, but he’s never received the recognition he’s earned. I adore those movies and the one that followed them, In the Name of the Father (1971). But after the iconoclastic bravado of those early efforts he didn’t exactly relax into bourgeois complacency; movies like Leap in the Void (1980) and The Eyes, the Mouth (1982) tease the brain and surprise the eye, and the performers – especially Michel Piccoli in the first and Angela Molina in the second – reach for complex emotional states, for effects that, perhaps, no one has caught on camera before. Since he hit his sixties (he turned eighty-one last November) it seems to me that he’s become, if anything, more ambitious and even more of a master. His 2003 Good Morning, Night, a dramatization of the Aldo Moro kidnapping by the Red Brigades (which is, for Italians, a historical black mark comparable to the JFK assassination for Americans), told from the point of view of one of the kidnappers, is one of the great political movies, and like Louis Malle’s 1974 Lacombe, Lucien, it transpires at the meeting point of history and philosophy. Vincere (2009), which focuses on Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s secret, abandoned wife (a magnificent performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno), is as staggering a piece of expressionist filmmaking as anything that came out of Ufa Studios in Berlin in the 1920s.

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part 2

Pamela Villoresi in Marco Bellocchio's adaptation of The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) (1977).

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part I was published here last week.

It seems strange to think of the iconoclastic, Godard-influenced Italian director Marco Bellocchio, who came into movies in the mid-sixties with the jagged, coruscating dark comedy Fists in the Pocket and the startling class satire China Is Near, settling on the idea of adapting Chekhov’s The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) to the screen. One can imagine Bellocchio identifying with the protagonist, the young tragic aspiring playwright and short-story writer Konstantin Treplev, when he protests, “We must have new forms!” before presenting his symbolist play to a small audience of family and friends that includes his mother, Irina Arkadina, a famous actress. (When she refuses to take his efforts seriously, he rings down the curtain and goes off in a huff.) But The Seagull, first performed disastrously in 1896 and resurrected two years later by Stanislavski and the pioneering Moscow Art Theatre, is one of the signal works of theatrical realism, and Bellocchio plays it straight. This movie never opened in North America, hardly anyone on these shores has ever seen it (it’s available on an Italian DVD), and except for Laura Betti, who also worked with Fellini, Pasolini and Bertolucci, I didn’t recognize a single actor in the cast. But the ensemble is impeccable, and this is certainly the best movie anyone has made yet of The Seagull.

Kidnapped: A Masterpiece by Bellocchio

Barbara Ronchi and Enea Sala in Kidnapped.

The Italian Marco Bellocchio must surely be the world’s greatest living filmmaker, since his most plausible competition, the Swedish Jan Troell, who turns ninety-three this week, hasn’t released a movie in a dozen years. Bellocchio, who will be eighty-five in November, is still working at the peak of his powers six decades after he burst on the scene with his astonishing – and still shocking – first full-length picture, Fists in the Pocket. The Traitor, a remarkable portrait of a Mafia soldier who turns state’s witness against the man he believes has dishonored the institution, was the best picture of 2020. He followed it with Marx Can Wait, a wildly unconventional documentary about his family seen in the light of the suicide of one of his brothers. North Americans still haven’t had a chance to view Esterno Notte, his six-part TV series, which revisits the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, the subject of my own favorite Bellocchio movie, Good Morning, Night (2003). And this summer saw, all too briefly, his latest work, Kidnapped, which is a masterpiece.

Three Neglected Gems (#36-37-38): Citizen Ruth (1996), Lila Says (2004) & Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Laura Dern stars in Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth (1996)

From Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) to Italy's Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning, Night), the best filmmakers often function as commentators and observers of their country's foibles, politics and attitudes. Whether it be the razor sharp satire of Spanish director Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) or the timely and relevant dramas of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (Cold Water, Summer Hours), those films educate, edify and illuminate the issues that roil and preoccupy a specific society, allowing uninformed viewers to glean a deeper understanding of what's going on below the sensationalist newspaper headlines and quickly tossed off news reports. Here are three films: two which revolve around the social politics, respectively, of the United States and France and another that gives a nod to a classic English novel while also examining the realities of Britain's celebrity culture.

Older Women, Younger Men: Devil in the Flesh, A Cold Wind in August, The Stripper

Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle in Devil in the Flesh (1947).

If you ask movie fans to come up with a classic drama about a romance between a young man and an older woman, the one they’re most likely to mention is The Graduate (1967), which, coming back to back with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, led Mike Nichols from celebrity as a Broadway director to (premature) celebrity as a moviemaker. But it wasn’t the first movie to dramatize this sort of relationship, and it’s far from the best. What keeps it in the memory is the interplay between Dustin Hoffman as the anxious, confused twenty-two-year-old Benjamin and Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, whose pretty daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) he thinks he’s in love with but whose mother has already seduced him. Hoffman is hilarious and sympathetic, and despite the fact that Calder Willingham and Buck Henry’s script can’t resist demonizing Mrs. Robinson, Bancroft is sensational. She was at the end of her too-brief great phase as a film actress, when she also starred in The Miracle Worker (opposite Patty Duke as Helen Keller) and The Pumpkin Eater (opposite Peter Finch). In the eighties and nineties, when she turned out one scenery-chewing performance after another, one wondered what the hell had happened to that complex, unpredictable actress, who could convey ferocious strength or fragility or a mixture of cynicism and melancholy with equal conviction.

Off the Shelf: Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008)

Most movies about idealistic teachers who inspire their charges are usually sappy (To Sir, With Love and Dead Poet’s Society), brutal (Lean On Me), or sometimes self-consciously instructive (Freedom Writers). In short, they remain painfully predictable. Rarely do they delve into the dynamics of the educational process, but instead fall back on the more inspirational side of learning life’s "important lessons." Put another way: People don’t learn in these pictures; they get ennobled. Entre les Murs (The Class) is that rare exception. It examines the complex dynamic that develops between an inspired teacher and a motley group of students.

Top Films of 2010: It Was Not a Very Good Year

2010 will likely go down as one of the very worst years ever in film, at least, in the twenty plus years I’ve been reviewing movies in Toronto. And while I like doing Best of the Year lists, compiling this one only served to remind me of how bad things were at the cinemas, both on the commercial end of things (Get Him To the Greek, Kick-Ass) and art house environs (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Tempest); those movies were equally painful to sit through. It was a strong year for documentaries, though (La danse, Inside Job, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Marwencol and others) and French films (Carlos, Un prophète, Micmacs). But American feature films were especially weak and negligible (The Social Network and Black Swan were about the only ones that stood out.) More to the point, once I factor in the films mentioned on my year end list below, there were only a few others (Another Year, The King’s Speech, Mother, Splice, Get Low, Trigger) that were worth my time. Usually there are three times that many good features to consider. But enough gloom and doom, without further ado here are my twelve top films of 2010, most of them reviewed on Critics at Large, the ones that excited, provoked, entertained and engrossed me in equal measure.

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part I

A still from Three Sisters (1970).

The reason you can keep looking at productions of the four Chekhov masterpieces – The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – is that there’s so much there. A good director and a good cast illumine corners of the text that you haven’t paid attention to before, or shine an unfamiliar light on one of more of the characters, or put the parts of the play together a little differently from their predecessors. I had that experience recently with two little-known Chekhov movies from the seventies. One I was returning to: Laurence Olivier’s 1970 Three Sisters, which transcribed his stage production for the National Theatre. It’s modest – like the movies he starred in of Uncle Vanya in 1963 and Othello in 1965 (both directed for the screen by Stuart Burge), it feels, with the exception of a couple of self-consciously cinematic sequences, like a filmed play. It was released in England, but on this side of the ocean audiences only got to see it as part of an experiment in stage-to-screen translations called American Film Theatre, which visited only large cities for two-day engagements. The other I encountered for the first time: the 1977 adaptation of The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) by the great Italian director Marco Bellocchio, which never opened in North America at all. Like Three Sisters, it’s available on DVD, but only from Europe. Both movies, I think, are wonderful. In this piece I want to talk about Three Sisters; I’ll deal with The Seagull next week.

Underappreciated Performances from 2014: A Selection

Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man.

It’s in the nature of movie awards to underscore the work that’s already receiving a glut of (often unmerited) attention and neglect the worthier achievements that slipped by unnoticed. And these days, when there’s so little difference between the movies that get nominated for Academy Awards and the ones that are recognized by critics’ groups, there are fewer chances than ever to bring fine neglected work into the limelight. Since more than any other element in movies, it’s the acting that excites me – and since no movie year, however dim in other respects, is without its long list of impressive performances – the sidelining of deserving actors during awards season always puts me in a funk. Of course, some of the actors who win praise deserve it, like the Oscar-nominated actors from The Imitation Game, Wild, Boyhood and The Theory of Everything. The ones showcased below deserve it too, however, and weren’t so lucky. Since I reviewed some of the performances I liked best on Critics at Large in the course of the year, I won’t recycle my impressions of Al Pacino in The Humbling, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in Get On Up, Keira Knightley in Begin Again, Jessica Lange in In Secret, Mia Wasichowska in Tracks, Agata Kulesza in Ida, Kenneth Branagh in his own film, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Annette Bening in The Face of Love, and the three stars of The Last of Robin Hood (Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon and Dakota Fanning).

Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

Mirror Man - Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

Kenneth Bowser's absorbing documentary, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, examines the life and tragic death of a political troubadour whose music perfectly mirrored the rise and fall of the sixties counter-culture. He does so by suggesting that Ochs, whose songs included "I Ain't Marching Anymore," "Draft Dodger Rag," "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" and "There But For Fortune," helped define the protest song movement. But the movie also shows how Ochs was undone by his affliction of manic depression that only escalated with the collapse of the left-wing idealism of the sixties. Bowser's view isn't wrong, exactly, but there's an even larger theme that lies unexplored (even though it's touched on) throughout the movie. In telling the story of a mirror man, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune also suggests that, by being a mirror who reflects, Phil Ochs was more a reflection of his times rather than a man who could help define and shape them. When those times were over, the personality - and the man - disappeared.

Phil Ochs

The topical song culture of the sixties, in which Ochs became an integral part, grew out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movement. The music of Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary and Odetta was literally ripped from the headlines of the daily news. Their songs, which spoke of injustice, racism and inequality, also carried the hope of building a new nation, one they felt lived up to the democratic principles that laid within the country's founding documents. Building on the spirit of Kennedy's New Frontier in 1960, the folk music movement, that percolated in the bohemian enclave of New York's Greenwich Village, dedicated itself to the idea that songs could actually change society. By drawing on the socialist realist legacy of the old left that included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, they believed that the songs themselves took prominence not the singers. To this community of activists, the performer was merely an instrument who brought forth both change and political awareness through their music. In true socialist realist fashion, the artist was defined more by the composition rather than the other way around. While some folk artists, like Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk, had strong enough personalities to prevent themselves from disappearing into their topical music (and Dylan simply cut himself loose from the ideological strait-jacket of the movement by embracing the Golden Calf of pop music where his individuality could thrive), Phil Ochs found himself a world - and a cause - that gave him a personality (and a purpose) that he might otherwise have lacked. As the movie finally reveals, too, his devotion to the cause obviously hid his personal problems. And when the movement died, so did Phil Ochs.