On DVD: Vincere, a Masterpiece of Mussolini

Already one of this year's best movies, Marco Bellocchio's Vincere bears the mark of a master filmmaker -- there isn't a wasted or ill-considered frame in it, and what is there is about as rich and immediate as traditional cinema gets.

Known here largely as a provocateur (thanks for the most part to the shruggable blowjob in 1986's Devil in the Flesh, easily his least interesting film), Bellocchio has had an EKG of a career. His debut Fists in the Pocket (1965) made him an instant star. A family bell jar of sociopathy and funeral rites, the film centers on a decaying, villa-occupying family that could be characterized as Milanese Gothic -- brawls are common, homicide always threatens, and epilepsy, used as a metaphor for psychosexual chaos, is rampant.

Eventually Bellocchio became focused on the poisonous trajectory of Italian history, a feast of material he has explored more deeply than any of his countrymen. He mellowed into an absurdist autumnal mood with The Wedding Director (2006), and began to mix his reality with movies and vice versa. This is a vein running through Vincere, too -- in recounting the early days of Benito Mussolini and the fate of his lover/revolutionary comrade Ida Dalser, Bellocchio scrambles history with this new thing called cinema, as if the 20th century began as one giant, crazy newsreel.

This is, after all, a tale about public appearances, performance (Mussolini remains the most outrageously overacting dictator on record) and collective madness. Bellocchio begins in the lead up to WWI, as Mussolini (Filippo Timi), a union leader, stumps for anti-monarchal revolution and gathers his power in public meetings, marches, battles with police and fiery trysts with the wild-eyed Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Historical movies that try to lasso together complex streams of social history can often be dull or simplistic, but Bellocchio grabs the bullhorn and makes political action action-packed; the movie is hot under the collar, rocketing from set piece to set piece, riot to sexual coupling to ideological duel (all of which can and do happen in movie theaters). The ambition is to have the movie's headlong fierceness mirror Mussolini's own, and the result is epic eye glue.

The grand arc of Vincere story-wise does not quite measure up to Bellocchio's dynamic choices or cinematographer Daniele Cipri's dense, warm, crepuscular images, because it is conventional as well as mega-dramatic. Once Dalser becomes pregnant and Mussolini returns wounded from WWI and she discovers he has a wife and kid already, the hot-blooded demimondaine's fate seems etched in stone: he rises in fame and power as she is shunted aside and, eventually, locked away in an insane asylum. Years pass, Mussolini (as himself in newsreels) becomes Il Duce, and her son (also Timi, once he's grown) is raised by a Fascist functionary.

To the end, Dalser insisted that she was Mussolini's wife, guaranteeing her own obliteration, a fate that awaited her equally stubborn son. The tragedy of Dalser's life is vicious but also repetitive; as the years pass in unpredictable leaps, her situation remains static. That is, until a nun sacrifices her habit and Dalser escapes.

Vincere translates as Win -- Mussolini's dictum throughout, human cost be damned. By the end, the Fascist leader remains an enigma, as obscure to us as he is to Dalser, as distant as a figure in news footage. But, actually, he's never really a mystery, just a powermongering narcissist. (And while we're at it, can we ask why Italy's contribution to the Axis devastation in WWII is rarely considered today?) The real mystery is fascism itself -- an inexplicable, viral kind of mass madness that for a time hypnotized some of Europe's most civilized societies.