Leading actor Favino in "Il Traditore": Even at the other end of the world you cannot escape the Cosa Nostra
Photo:Pandora
In the left corner of the picture there is always a number that increases rapidly from scene to scene. It shows the death rate. Director Marco Bellocchio keeps the audience of his film up to date on how many people died in the slaughter of the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. Now and then he shows how it happens. Sometimes a hand is cut off, then men sink to the ground in a hail of bullets or are strangled with bare arms. At some point you will understand why Mafiosi tend to have an extended family. They need many relatives and have many children so that there may be at least a few left.
"Il Traditore" tells the life story of Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), who murdered for the Cosa Nostra, was arrested in Brazil in the mid-1980s and testified in court against his former bosses. In the first of three trials against the Cosa Nostra alone, a total of 344 defendants were sentenced to 2,665 years in prison in 1987. In retaliation, the mafia murdered 14 relatives of Buscetta's, including two of his sons. Buscetta entered a witness protection program and received pension payments from the Italian state until his death in 2000.
The Buscetta in this film is a man who is stuck in a monstrous network and who wants to escape from it. But where? The Cosa Nostra does not appear in "Il Traditore" as a parallel society, but as the only society that exists. It works by its own rules and even has a social welfare system. If a man ends up in prison, his family receives financial support. Someone like the judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), who fights against the Mafia, acts like a lawbreaker in this world who simply does not want to accept the law that applies here.
Because "Il Traditore" sees its main character as part of a system, the film differs from many American Mafia epics. They like to celebrate their heroes as people who enjoy their excessive lifestyle to the fullest: border crossers between glamor and violence, who sometimes bathe in money and sometimes in blood - and in the end mostly have to pay for it. Bellocchio shows landscapes and cuts scenes against them in which Buscetta is tortured. He's more of a sad wimp than a tragic hero.
When he is sitting on the witness chair in court, alone against the Mafia, in a bunker that was built especially for this trial and is said to have been rocket-proof, Bellocchio turns the film into a farce. While Buscetta testifies, the numerous defendants sit and stand in cages on the other side of the room and try to shout Buscetta down. The judge desperately calls her to order, but hardly gets the chaos under control.
The trial that was televised at the time was, in reality, at times grotesquely theatrical. The defendants protested their innocence with plenty of words and gestures and looked like dope comedians. Buscetta also made a grand entrance and stepped into the hall wearing sunglasses, surrounded by security guards. Bellocchio shows this show trial, which was at least as much about vanity as the truth, as a monkey theater and at the same time tries to take his hero as seriously as possible.
In fact, there is something touching about how Buscetta tries in the film to do the right thing with blood on his hands. How he convinces himself that everything used to be much better before the Cosa Nostra started dealing in heroin. Yes, the drugs, they would have corrupted everything. But Bellocchio won't let him get away with this life lie. When Buscetta is sitting in Florida many years after the trial, a submachine gun in hand, because he reckons that a Mafia killer could turn up at any time, he remembers the first man he killed. He takes these pictures with him to the grave.
Icon: The mirror