Vincere
Unrated (sex, nudity); 122 min.
One of the most surprising things about watching the wrenching Vincere, the story of Mussolini's secret wife, Ida Dalser, and his firstborn son, Benito, is that when the relationship went sour and Ida just wouldn't let it rest, that Il Duce, the sweet one, just didn't have her killed.
Though Ida's life would become a torturous hell spent locked away in an insane asylum, the legacy left by her letters has made for an intense and intriguing, if at times uneven, film, with Italian director Marco Bellocchio wringing every drop of emotion out of his actors and his audience before it is over.
The passion is palpable from the first frame, as Ida, played with exquisite anger by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, first spots Mussolini (Filippo Timi in frightening form). Watch in hand, he's giving God five minutes to prove his existence by challenging the almighty to strike him dead -- an early glimpse of the facile manipulator he would become -- while she's just a face in the crowd.
The story unfolds on two levels -- the personal and the public -- with Bellocchio moving between the two to sometimes confusing effect. To tell of the growing unrest in Italy and Mussolini's rise along with the Fascist Party, he delves into the troves of archival footage, understanding how potent those historical images could be, and how impossibly costly they would have been to re-create. Meanwhile, the filmmaker keeps the color palette of the rest of the movie rich but muted, to soften the shift between the black and white newsreels and Ida's unfolding story.
Mezzogiorno channels the passion of their torrid affair into the unrelenting defiance that would sustain Ida over time. Almost as powerful on screen is Timi, who is chilling as Mussolini, making his charisma come to life with a force that makes his iron-fisted hold over a woman, as well as a country, understandable.
In Italian with English subtitles.
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