Vincere

While Benito Mussolini is still a young socialist journalist, Ida Dalser meets him, falls in love, sells everything she owns to finance him, and has a son by him. As he marches towards power, he erases the relationship from history. The more she insists on it, the further she is pushed into an asylum. The film is not interested in the birth of fascism. It is interested in record-keeping: she tries to prove she exists with the documents she holds, and the state destroys documents. Its horror comes less from violence than from the fact that official memory can delete a person. The form is operatic: archive footage, huge projections, loud music and silent-era intertitles all used together. After a certain point Marco Bellocchio stops showing Mussolini on screen at all and lets him exist only as real archive film. The true story is harsher than the ending. Ida Dalser died in an asylum in Venice in 1937; her son Benito Albino died in 1942 at twenty-six in a hospital near Milan. It was the only Italian film in competition at Cannes in 2009. Giovanna Mezzogiorno plays Ida and Filippo Timi plays Mussolini. Who it is for: viewers interested in political history and in formally bold filmmaking. Who it is not for: anyone wanting calm narration. The film plays at high pitch from beginning to end and is emotionally tiring.