MOVIE REVIEW
'GOOD MORNING, NIGHT'
With Hearts on Fire, Souls Dying of Thirst
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 10, 2003
Motion Pictures
New York Film Festival
Bellocchio, Marco, Italy
In his early films, like "Fists in the Pocket" (1965), "China Is Near" (1967) and "In the Name of the Father" (1971), Marco Bellocchio emerged as perhaps the most incisive and passionate cinematic witness to the social, political and spiritual upheavals that convulsed Italy in the 1960's and 70's.
His most recent movies, "My Mother's Smile" and "Good Morning, Night," struggle to make sense of the painful and ambiguous legacy of those years. The hero of "My Mother's Smile," shown at the New York Film Festival last year, was a left-wing, secular intellectual whose youthful faith in human progress withered into cynicism and solipsism after the future he had had once believed in failed to materialize.
"Good Morning, Night," showing at Lincoln Center tonight and tomorrow as part of this year's festival, reimagines the notorious kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, one of the ugliest and most senseless episodes in modern Italian political history and in the annals of the Western European left.
Moro was the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats and one of the architects of a power-sharing arrangement with the Italian Communist Party, a historic compromise intended to bring a measure of normalcy to the nation's fractious and chaotic political order. His kidnappers, self-proclaimed proletarian revolutionaries for whom any form of compromise (or of normalcy) was anathema, imagined that their action would incite a full-scale uprising against the state and its institutions. ("Why aren't they rebelling?" one of the brigatisti wonders, honestly perplexed, when the television shows crowds filling the streets to demand Moro's release.)
Mr. Bellocchio replays this large-scale ideological melodrama as a quiet domestic tragedy. Most of the action takes place in a spacious ground-floor apartment in Rome where four supposed champions of the radical working class erect a screen of quiet bourgeois domesticity to camouflage their crime. Chiara (Maya Sansa), the only woman in the group, keeps a wedding ring in a box near the front door. She puts it on when the bell rings or when she goes out to her office job. On the day of the kidnapping, she is reluctantly caring for a neighbor's baby when her pretend husband (Giovanni Calcagno) and their two clandestine roommates arrive dragging a huge wooden crate containing the politician (Roberto Herlitzka). The scene has an almost comical matter-of-factness: the oblivious infant gurgles on the couch while the terrorists try to angle the unwieldy box into the cell they have built behind a bookshelf.
What follows is like a surreal parody of family life in which the young radicals, who keep an impressively orderly house, seem to view the old man in the next room as an inconvenient, doted-on older relative rather than as their prisoner. They address him, without sarcasm, as Presidente, and their leader (Luigi Lo Cascio) patiently argues with him about history, theology and the finer points of Marxist theory. The calm, dispassionate tones of their discussion make its brutal upshot — a death sentence issued in the name of proletarian justice — all the more disturbing.
Moro's quiet, grandfatherly demeanor eventually pierces Chiara's steely resolve, even though they never speak face to face, and "Good Morning, Night" is largely concerned with her crisis of confidence.
At night her dreams flicker with black-and-white newsreel images of past revolutionary glory, and she falls asleep reading the letters of left-wing partisans executed by the Fascists during World War II. Inevitably she begins to identify Moro's plight with theirs, a confusion driven home when she attends a family wedding, where her older relatives, their faces as kindly and wrinkled as his, burst into a rousing anti-Fascist marching song. This scene suggests that Chiara's extremism, and that of her peers, may be rooted in admiration and envy for the older generation, who were fortunate enough to have a clear enemy and a noble cause.
The contrast between generations could not be more damning: the veterans are full of life and robust feeling, which their would-be heirs have reduced to desiccated theory and murderous abstraction. The brigade members are willing — indeed eager — to sacrifice not only the lives of their supposed oppressors, but their own humanity as well.
Ms. Sansa is an actress of exquisite sensitivity: her wide brown eyes and childlike mouth always seeming to tremble on the verge of laughter or tears, but Mr. Bellocchio does not delve too deeply into her psychology. He approaches his characters with sympathy but also with skeptical detachment. At times "Good Morning, Night" feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity. The understatement of the acting and the muted rhythms of the story are offset by bursts of lustrous color (the director of photography is Pasquale Mari) and blasts of lush, sometimes jarring music (much of it composed by Riccardo Giagni).
Like fanatics of every creed and hue, Chiara and her accomplices have pledged themselves to the eradication of subjective feeling, and the film's sudden eruptions of passion, which are visual and aural rather than dramatic, represent the return of everything they have repressed in their mad, destructive crusade for absolute liberation.
GOOD MORNING, NIGHT
Written (in Italian, with English subtitles) and directed by Marco Bellocchio; director of photography, Pasquale Mari; music by Riccardo Giagni; edited by Francesca Calvelli; production designer, Marco Dentici; produced by Mr. Bellocchio and Sergio Pelone. Running time: 105 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with a 12-minute short, Christophe Perrier's "Shadows Company," tonightat 6 and tomorrow afternoon at 3:30 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, as part of the 41st New York Film Festival.
WITH: Maya Sansa (Chiara), Luigi Lo Cascio (Mariano), Pier Giorgio Bellocchio (Ernesto), Giovanni Calcagno (Primo), Paolo Briguglia (Enzo) and Roberto Herlitzka (Aldo Moro).
un lancio ANSA del pomeriggio:
ANSA 17:19 -10:10:03
«IL CINEMA ITALIANO CONQUISTA NEW YORK
Bellocchio e Giordana presentati nel corso del week end
(ANSA) - NEW YORK, 10 OTT - Il cinema italiano conquista New York nel fine settimana del Columbus Day con Buongiorno Notte di Bellocchio e La Meglio Gioventù di Giordana. Le due pellicole saranno presentate nel corso del week end al prestigioso New York Film Festival. La Meglio Gioventù e' stato acquistato dalla Miramax con l'obiettivo di una distribuzione negli Usa, Canada, Australia, Gran Breatagna e Nuova Zelanda. Bellocchio ha ricevuto oggi la lusinghiera recensione del critico del New York Times».
