Good Morning, Night

An apartment in Rome in 1978. Inside are four members of the Red Brigades and the former prime minister they have kidnapped, Aldo Moro. He is held in a small room, writing letters, appealing to his family. Outside, the state refuses to negotiate. We follow events through the woman in the group: by day she works an ordinary job, in the evening she goes home. The subject is not politics but the people in the room where the decision is made being unable to look at one another. The woman gradually stops being able to see Moro as an enemy; the tension of the film sits on hesitation rather than action. The form does not separate reality from dream. There are scenes in her mind in which Moro is released, and the film interweaves them with news footage. The final passage plainly shows something that did not happen: the man walks out into the street early in the morning and nobody stops him. The production was argued over in Italy. Marco Bellocchio chose to tell the case through the inner world of a perpetrator rather than as political analysis, an approach that was both praised and attacked. The source is the account of one of the women in the group. Maya Sansa plays the woman and Roberto Herlitzka plays Moro, with Luigi Lo Cascio in the cast. Who it is for: viewers curious about Italy's years of lead and political drama. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the historical frame of the case; the film deliberately shuts itself in one room.