NEW YORK PRESS November 9-15
http://www.nypress.com/18/45/film/ArmondWhite.cfm
SINISTER ACCOUNTABILITY
The treachery of the Red Brigades
By Armond White
GOOD MORNING, NIGHT
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
You Might guess that a great director is behind Good Morning, Night from the opening scene, when a young Italian couple who look like newlyweds are split off from each other. They're in the same frame—but in different rooms—as a real estate agent guides them through the layout of a rental apartment in Rome. Director Marco Bellocchio elegantly shows that something is off; through that bifurcation the simple scene is dynamized visually, emotionally. When lateral blinds are raised and sunlight bursts into the rooms, every second introduces a battle between light and dark, openness and deception. It's highly stylish but style has meaning in this movie because for Bellocchio, filmmaking is about dazzling the senses, vivifying the intellect.
But it's a later scene that confirms Good Morning, Night's greatness: As that couple sets up house with a group of comrades, their ruse of domesticity gets tested when the woman, Chiara (Maya Sansa), answers her doorbell and has a neighbor's baby shoved at her. Although she's some kind of outlaw (soon to be revealed as a member of a radical political sect with nefarious plans), that's providence that is placed in her arms. Bellocchio's superb visual jest teases the future of Italy and of political activism even as it arouses Chiara's filial compassion, the part of her humanity (and her untested maternity) that she had put aside for the cause.
All that, in one image, is great filmmaking.
If the name Marco Bellocchio is not as familiar as Bernardo Bertolucci, know that they are peers. Two superb politically grounded, visually attuned filmmakers from the '60s who have not lost the art & politics enthusiasms of their youth. Good Morning, Night recalls Bertolucci's The Dreamers as a look back at pivotal moments in the filmmaker's political romance, but this movie has a tougher subject than The Dreamers' movie-soaked memory of Paris in May '68. Good Morning, Night re-creates the souring of such activism. Bellocchio dramatizes how in 1978 Italy's Red Brigade kidnapped and assassinated the prime minister Aldo Moro, head of the Christian Democrat party.
Whether or not you are aware of that history, Bellocchio makes the story vital. Uninterested in creating "suspense," Bellocchio takes advantage of already-determined history to look deeper. He can't change Moro's death or the Red Brigade's treachery, but he helpfully dissects the agonized thinking that went on in those moments: the way Italy's government establishment inadvertently betrayed Moro, how even the Vatican pleaded for Moro's release, challenging the country's political compulsions. It is through this probing of an era—a culture—that Bellocchio touches on the complicated and contradictory ambitions of a nation in turmoil.
The apartment where the Red Brigade keeps Moro hostage (while life goes on outdoors) allows Bellocchio to pursue this political story as an intimate, domestic one. The close-quarters metaphor puts the tragedy into the home, creating an aura of perverse personal involvement and sinister accountability. It's a grave spinoff from Godard's La Chinoise about French Maoists practicing radicalism in a cell. Through Chiara, a naïve zealot, Bellocchio seeks to understand how the Italian soul countenanced the Red Brigade's terrorist insanity and self-justification. (There's uneasy respite when Chiara attends a family's reunion, which turns into a memorial for those WWII partisans who died as part of the Resistance. Meanwhile, her confreres wait anxiously for the people's support.) Chiara's personal conflict takes the movie beyond a dry, factual procedural; it becomes a wondrous and unsettling exploration of an ideologue's contradictions and misgivings.
Bellocchio always showed a nearly clinical interest in his characters' mental conflicts and political delusions. His '60s art-house hits Fists in the Pocket and China is Near were practically psychoanalytical —and political— screwball comedies. The 1973 Nel Nome del Padre was the type of hallucinatory Catholic-Socialist epic we've given up hoping Scorsese would create. Now, Bellocchio's familiarity with neurosis as the source of family and public turmoil cuts to the quick of the terrorist phenomenon. (He might have turned the very good Paradise Now into a masterwork.) The only director with as sharp an eye for personality quirk is Mike Leigh, but Bellocchio incorporates neurotic types more casually. He makes no spectacle of psychosis; it's a natural part of his flow. At times, Chiara and her four male comrades are like vengeful siblings punishing their father through the ultimate act of rebellion.
Deep inside this dysfunction, Bellocchio and cinematographer Pasquale Mari treat the kidnapping as a literal obscenity. The apartment with the cubbyhole where Moro is imprisoned is kept dark. As the terrorists spy on Moro, who is forced to write letters to his family and colleagues, a variety of iris-like apertures give a voyeuristic peephole effect that is embarrassingly intimate. Bellocchio refuses obvious rack-focus for in-an-out transitions and movements; he masterfully forces us to shift perspective on our own—always analyzing the Red Brigade's offense.
It's when Bellocchio attends to Chiara's dreams that Good Morning, Night becomes most extraordinary. She has faded black-an-white visions of Russia's winter revolution (Lenin, Stalin). These include a remarkable documentary montage of actual political assassinations (ingeniously scored to The Dark Side of the Moon), reminding Chiara of the grim history she's about to join. Her only release from this political trap are these beautiful/horrifying dreams. Her male comrades play lethal real-life politics while she ponders the consequences. She secretly fantasizes conversing with Moro (played by Roberto Herllitzka) when the men sleep, as if making rapprochement with her father's underground legacy. The mix of news footage, dream and stylized drama is implicative and historical, amounting to a personally felt elegy. Good Morning, Night is full of simultaneous yearning and regret. (It is the much needed antidote to George Clooney's cheap shuffling of TV clips and propagandistic myth in the snide and annoyingly titled Good Night, and Good Luck.)
By all rights, this is Bellocchio's year — the return of a great artist to American film consciousness. His style has become lucid and serene, while Bertolucci's remains heady and voluptuous. Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile, released last spring, was a comedy about religious doubt; in Good Morning, Night he depicts political disillusionment as the sorrowful awareness of doing wrong. Both films are visually alluring and morally sophisticated—reminders of how exciting real political filmmaking can be.
