Esterno Notte (part I)

On 16 March 1978 in Rome, the Red Brigades ambush the convoy of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, kill his bodyguards and take him. The film moves back and forth from that moment and tells the events not through one person but through everyone around him. It is not interested in the hostage crisis. It is interested in the paralysis of institutions: the interior minister, the Pope, Moro's wife and the brigade members each get their own section, and while all of them do what they think right, the man dies. Bellocchio builds it not as a crime story but as a distribution of responsibility. The form has the scale of a television series with the language of cinema: period Rome, dark colours, scenes blended with archive footage, and dream sequences. Marco Bellocchio directed. He had told the same events once before in Good Morning, Night in 2003; this time he moves the vantage point from the kidnappers to the side of the state. The production screened at Cannes in 2022. Fabrizio Gifuni plays Moro, Margherita Buy his wife and Toni Servillo Pope Paul VI. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political history and multi-perspective narrative. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with the subject. The film assumes you know the Italian political map of the seventies and introduces none of its names.