An Italian friend of the site scolded me for not having seen Marco Bellocchio's 2003's Good Morning, Night. It took me forever to settle down with the film on disc, and I've been curious ever since to see where the veteran Italian director would go next, especially films that deal with complicated political landscape found in his backyard. Bellocchio could not have picked a bigger canvas in which to work with when he commenced working on history book bad guy Benito Mussolini.
Headed off to Cannes in the Main Competition, Vincere focuses on the scorned/stubborn lover/wife's journey. In the trailer below, you don't need to comprehend Michelangelo's main tongue to grasp how Benito tried to keep his past and relationship with Ida Dalser in the dark.
Here is the synopsis, and after the jump you can find the trailer.
Before became a powerful dictator, Mussolini had a a past. He had a wife and a son, Benito Albino, who was born, acknowledged and then denied. The secret bears a name: Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). It is a dark page in history, one ignored in the official biography of the Duce. When Ida meets Mussolini in Milan, he is the editor of Avanti and an ardent Socialist who intends to guide the masses towards an anti-clerical, anti-monarchical, socially emancipated future. Ida already had a fleeting encounter with him in Trento and remained thunderstruck.
Ida truly believes in him and his ideas. In order to finance Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper he has founded and the nucleus of the forthcoming Fascist Party, Ida sells everything she has. When the First World War erupts, Mussolini enrolls in the Army and disappears. When Ida finds him again in a military hospital, he is tended to by Rachele whom he has just married. Ida lashes out at her rival furiously, demanding her rights as Mussolini’s true wife and the mother of his first-born son. She is led away by force. For more than eleven years, she is locked away in an insane asylum (and her son in an institute) where she is put under, physical restraint and tortured.
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