One Way or Another

The leading men of the governing party shut themselves in a monastery hotel. The official reason is a spiritual retreat; the real one is dividing up the offices. A Jesuit puts them through exercises: prayer, confession, silence. Then the ministers start being killed one by one and nobody arrives from outside. The subject is not murder but a political class enclosing itself and rotting. There is no public in the film, no opposition, no electorate; only men of the same party and the accounts between them. The killings are not set up as a detective promise and no solution comes. The form is airless and deliberately ugly. Underground corridors, wet concrete, rain and a crowd in constant movement. Elio Petri shoots the scenes as ritual; the meals, the prayer queues and the processions repeat in the same order. The character at the centre openly resembles the most powerful politician of the period: Gian Maria Volonté's speech, bearing and appearance point directly at him. The source is Leonardo Sciascia's novel. That is where the film's fate came from too. It was pulled soon after release, and once that politician was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades in 1978 it disappeared from circulation entirely and could not be seen for a long time. Marcello Mastroianni plays the priest. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political cinema and hard allegory. Who it is not for: anyone without the context; the film assumes you know the politics of its moment.