Marco Bellocchio addresses this historical episode for the second time and makes us wonder about representation and fiction
First, a little summary (although someone may see this paragraph as a spoiler, I think the director is counting on everyone knowing what happened at the end): the series represents a key moment in Italian political history in the 70s, sometimes compared in importance with the attack against Carrero Blanco in Spain: the kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades of the politician Aldo Moro, leader and symbol of a party, the Christian Democrats, which has been in power for decades. Very hard years in Italy, with attacks every week, massive strikes and a major intergenerational conflict.
Any cultural product that is based on real events runs a risk and plays with that same risk: becoming canonical, arrogating the power to define an event forever, supplanting other versions and even reality itself. Not having time, in general, to delve into all the events that marked the world, many times we are content with a few works, fortunately some very good ones, that will decide how we understand that part of history. It’s better than nothing, but it could always be deeper.
So when it comes to judging works as full of interest as ‘Exterior, noche’, we have a dichotomy: do we have to judge if it has represented some facts better or worse, or do we have to judge if it is dramatically interesting, entertaining, well done? Well, it will have to be done with both things, but without forgetting how interrelated they are. Because we are not convinced by the neurotic personality and the interpretation of the actor who gives life to Francesco Cossiga also affects whether or not we are convinced by the representation of the story. A useless of such a caliber in fiction, accompanied by an absurd circus tune, it is impossible for him to become head of the Italian government and state a few years later.
The series features some notable hallucinations. /
Quite the opposite happens with Moro, excellently interpreted by Fabrizio Gifuni (in other versions of the same events we find Gian Maria Volonté, who curiously also appears in ‘Operación Ogre’). Gifuni is hard to beat, and the series paints a brutal portrait of a completely pious, innocent and patient negotiator man… so much so that one would have to wonder if he might not be too hagiographic. He makes us wonder if he can rise to the top of a great political party without being a bit of a bad person. In the series he does not have it. The letters that Moro writes in captivity, more than fifty, are represented here selected and read, but it is not clear how they developed and the terrible evolution of the politician towards despair, unceremoniously accusing those who must save him.
It may be more tedious, but if we delve into those letters from Moro to all kinds of people and institutions (several of them collected in their entirety in ‘El caso Moro’, the “hot-written” book by the then deputy —and author of marvels such as ‘ Todo Modo’— Leonardo Sciacia), we find a somewhat different character, and much less affable in the final sections.
It has been commented that the series, rather than condemning the terrorist act (probably already sufficiently condemned) intends to settle accounts with those other leaders of the Christian Democrats who “let Moro die” by refusing to negotiate. This is how it is, and in a cosmic revenge, it allows us to delight in seeing as a hallucination what a meeting between them and Moro would be like if they had finally released him alive. The politician’s disgusted face will be with us for a long time, but none of the others are alive to see it on the screen anymore. And it is that another downside to the series is that it seems that for those members of DC (Andreotti, Cossiga and Zaccagnini in particular) everything is too big for them and they act improvised, but the reality is sadder and contains large doses of cynicism: it was almost preferable that More did not return. They declare him practically crazy and decide to ignore anything he says in a very coordinated action. In the series, the pressure groups that politicians have to deal with are too schematic and with a bit of a broad brush. And we also miss giving more relevance to the figure of Enrico Berlinguer and the immensity of the Italian Communist Party of the time, an anomaly in Western Europe that must be known in order to weigh the facts well, since Moro was precisely going to open the door a little for him. door to the PCI in the “compromesso storico” and it was going to be ratified that same day of the kidnapping. Neither Washington nor Moscow were in favor.
Toni Servillo and Margherita Buy are Paul VI and Eleonora Moro /
Pope Paul VI (Toni Servillo), a friend of Moro, appears with his own chapter, the captors appear, with their extremely tense lives on the edge (in Bellocchio’s previous film on the subject, he delves deeper into them), and the future widow, Eleonora Moro (Margherita Buy), in a great episode where it becomes clear that the family is alone in this absurdity. Foreign interference does not appear in the series (look for Gladio, for example) or the P-2 Freemasons, but it is clear that they were there (look for the name Licio Gelli, what a biography). Who returns in the final episode is Moro. And to try to understand it, Marco Bellocchio has introduced another bit of fiction: the imagined conversation with a priest that the kidnappers take him so that he dies in peace. There this Moro can vent and call things by his name, accuse and make his position clear in confidence. It doesn’t seem like in the actual story he could do it.
You could pull the thread and spend much longer discovering things, so this series is a great invitation to discover a piece of history. The Italian public will have a little more context (although 45 years have passed, we forget everything), but here we can still enjoy ourselves and, later, start investigating. With something to improve, it is totally recommended.
#night #Filmin #reenact #Aldo #Moros #ordeal