Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, once gave God five minutes to strike him dead. When he remained alive, he proclaimed that the Deity didn’t exist.
Still, he needed the support of the Vatican in his path towards power and, once he had won it, he rudely slung aside Ida Dalser, the mistress who had borne him a son. She ended up in an asylum.
Marco Bellocchio’s film is primarily about her efforts to proclaim she was the only woman in his life — and also shows how power corrupts even the most personal relationships.
Bellocchio, who made the classic Fists in the Pocket almost 50 years ago, throws caution to the wind in telling his story, going backwards and forwards in time, sometimes confusingly, and using documentary footage as well as expert recreations of the period. He also relies on a virtuoso performance from Giovanna Mezzogiorno as the cast-off Ida. Her floods of tears and hysterics may be a little wearing but they show us a woman who refused to give up on the man she loved so obsessively.
Ida wrote letters to the Pope, invaded the dictator’s meetings, made many attempts to escape mental institutions (a psychiatrist tells her that a quieter approach might yield dividends) and demanded that her son Benito (Fabrizio Costella) be recognised.
Vincere maintains its grip through sheer flair. Ida is more wronged woman than heroine and Mussolini anything but the fat baboon of his caricatures. Filippo Timi plays him with suitable menace and brio, and also plays his grown-up son, who ultimately aped his father’s histrionics.
This is a film that posits fascism as a creed that envelops every facet of life, right down to a kind of stunted erotomania, which has Mussolini naked on his balcony after love-making with Ida and acknowledging crowds who aren’t yet there to salute him.
Vincere
Cert: 15
