Movie review of the day

Rico says he hasn't seen it (and isn't likely to), but Manohla Dargis (another great name) has a review of Vincere in The New York Times:

“The mass loves strong men,” Benito Mussolini once said. “The mass is female.” In Vincere, a sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film, the veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio brilliantly personalizes Mussolini’s rise to power through a fictional retelling of his seduction and catastrophically violent betrayal of his reputed first wife, Ida Dalser. Like much of Italy, Dalser abandoned herself to him body and soul. The film’s title— a reference to a popular Italian Fascist song— means to win, as in to defeat, vanquish, surpass. “Win, win, win!” Fascist soldiers would sing, as Il Duce aroused the populace. “At any cost!”
For Ida Dalser, played with deep feeling and rivers of tears by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, that cost would be devastating. But first came love. You initially see her watching Mussolini (an outstanding Filippo Timi) during an early philosophical smackdown. “I challenge God,” he bellows through a haze of cigarette smoke as his jaw thrusts into an anonymous meeting room like a fist. Mussolini then gives the big man upstairs five minutes to strike him dead: “If he does not, it will be the proof that he doesn’t exist.” The small, tightly packed audience facing Mussolini waits (as do we), judge and hanging jury combined, as a smile creeps onto his face. “Times up, God doesn’t exist!” he announces, which, given what happens next, seems an easy call. (Ida, meanwhile, has found her god.)
Mr. Bellocchio arranges these opening scenes out of joint— the timeline initially and somewhat confusingly skips back and forth between 1907 and 1914— but most of what follows in Vincere is straightforward, painful, severe, and tragic. Even so, while it spans the relationship of Dalser and Mussolini from turgid beginning to brutal end, the film doesn’t stick to the usual biopic template: there’s very little about their different histories, for instance, which are either ignored or sketched in. He materializes as if out of nowhere, and you briefly see her in some kind of shop. (She owned a beauty salon.) As if mesmerized, she rushes toward him, as when she helps him hide from the police during a riot, violence that they seal with a kiss.
Time and film whoosh by as Mr. Bellocchio hits various historical marks, including Mussolini’s expulsion from the Socialist Party in 1914 because of his support for Italy’s entrance into World War One. He subsequently starts a newspaper that Dalser, in a disastrous move, helps bankroll. Having emptied her purse, she then waits for him, stretched out naked in bed like an offering, which he greedily devours. Her magnanimity blurs into masochism, as Mussolini, ever more powerful and elusive, gathers his fascist forces. By 1922 he is the dictator of Italy and the husband of his official first wife, Rachele (Michela Cescon), and Dalser has given birth to a son, Benito Albino (Fabrizio Costella), turning her and her child into enemies of the state.
Mr. Bellocchio never baldly states the obvious, but he does suggest that Mussolini hid his real relationship with Dalser, at least in part, because he didn’t want to alienate the Roman Catholic Church, with whom he had to share power. In one savagely pointed sequence set in a church doubling as a hospital, he shows a bandaged Mussolini (who finally got his much-coveted World War One) avidly watching a film about Jesus, a juxtaposition that suggests not only how the dictator-savior saw himself but also how he would soon be seen by his country. Later, after Mussolini becomes dictator, Mr. Bellocchio, who makes great use of old newsreels and other archival material throughout, also throws in a photograph of the real Il Duce with some clerics to make just that point.
Given the role he assumed, it makes sense that Mussolini would have scorned Dalser, who could only have taken on the role of the apostate. It’s a part that Ms. Mezzogiorno plays with great ferocity and, given how much time her character spent yelling in mental institutions, true stamina.
In time she and her son are forced apart (Mussolini officially recognizes the child as his), a separation that irreparably damages them. It also hurts the movie because Mr. Bellocchio— who can’t get enough of her suffering, though you eventually might— proves as loyal to her as Mussolini was disloyal. She might be enormously sympathetic, but as the days turn into years, and she keeps rattling her cage, she comes very close to being more wearisome than tragic.
Ms. Mezzogiorno does hold you hard, but the world beyond her prisons— literal and psychological— has its obvious attractions . And the truth is that she isn’t the only one who misses Mussolini, who disappears from the film for a long stretch, glimpsed only in newsreels and finally in the face of his grown son, also played by Mr. Timi. His performance as the adult Benito is brief if masterly, and devastating. Like the Hollywood B-movie directors of the golden age who created worlds out of shadows, Mr. Bellocchio resurrects the tragedy of an entire nation with newsreel footage, some smoke, bits of Futurist art and the image of one Italian son in whose devastated face you see millions.