dal New York Times
MOVIE REVIEW
'GOOD MORNING, NIGHT'
MORE ON 'GOOD MORNING, NIGHT'
Faking the Family Life, With a Kidnapping Victim Behind the Bookshelf
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 11, 2005
"Good Morning, Night" was shown as part of the New York Film Festival in 2003. Following are excerpts from A. O. Scott's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 10, 2003. The unrated film, in Italian with English subtitles, opens today in Manhattan at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village.
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" was a left-wing, secular intellectual whose youthful faith in human progress withered into cynicism and solipsism after the future he had once believed in failed to materialize.
"Good Morning, Night" reimagines the notorious kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the former prime minister, 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 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 for, and envy of, the older generation, which was 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.
