da filmstew.com, Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Festival Shrouded in Fog Of War
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By A.G. Basoli
(per vedere l'originale integrale di questo articolo, con una bella foto di Maya Sansa a pag. 2, cliccare QUI)
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Meanwhile, the sixties took center stage with Errol Morris’s Centerpiece documentary Fog of War, about the controversial former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. It acted as a starting point of sorts for Marco Tullion Giordana’s sweeping and award-winning journey through 40 years of Italian history, The Best of Youth.
Seamlessly working off his countryman’s flow, Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night seemed to glean the same kind of free flowing epic style as it recounted one of the most tragic episodes in the country’s history, conjuring up the kidnapping and assassination in 1978 of Italian Statesman Aldo Moro like some half-remembered detail from Italy’s subconscious realm.
“It’s probably indicative of what’s on filmmakers’ minds,” said festival director Richard Peña, also chair of the five-member selection committee. “Perhaps people are looking back to that decade – to notions of political commitment and engagement – and beginning to sort of reassess. We’re at a time when a kind of political consciousness has returned and we’re going back to the last moments when that happened.”
The Moro affair was the defining moment of a decade later known in Italy as “The Leaden Years,” referencing the lead bullets used by left-wing terror groups such as The Red Brigades in their seemingly daily attacks on public figures.
Bellocchio’s direction and script rejects the documentary-like techniques of traditional “cinema d’inchiesta,” honoring instead the conspiratorial political climate of the time. The filmmaker approaches the material with dreamy cautiousness, daring to imagine through the eyes of his female protagonist, who also happens to be the most disillusioned member of the terrorist cell, a different ending for their illustrious hostage.
“In real life, she wasn’t like that,” explains Bellocchio, who met original terrorist Annalaura Braghetti and loosely inspired the film on her book The Prisoner. “She continued to be a terrorist and participated in the assassination of Professor Bachelet, later on. She thought it was horrible but always obeyed. I took the liberty of creating a character who would have reacted and had a growing sense of what was happening.”
Italian actress Maya Sansa, who also appears in Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth, plays the reluctant terrorist Anna with smoldering intensity. Despite a disappointing premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the film was a hit in Italy, grossing more than a million Euros in its opening weeks.
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