At 83, Marco Bellocchio still has a thirst for experimentation and innovation.
With
Esterno notte,
the great master of Italian cinema signs his first miniseries and delivers a
"reverse shot to his work".
Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 (an honor rarely granted to programs dedicated to the small screen), these six episodes, co-produced by Rai and Arte, which will be broadcast on Wednesday March 15 and Thursday March 16, on the Franco-German channel, are online today on Arte.tv.
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Twenty years after his feature film
Buongiorno, a note
which recounted the kidnapping and then the assassination in 1978 of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades through the eyes of his jailers, the director of
La Belle endormie
and du
Traiteur
returns to the torture of the former Italian Prime Minister.
A trauma, a pain that still marks the collective unconscious of his country with a hot iron.
"Still bruised today, like his compatriots"
, the filmmaker felt the desire to return to the subject following the commemorations of the fortieth anniversary of the death of the professor and politician.
During his visit to Paris in December, he confided:
“I saw images of Aldo Moro captured in the days preceding his abduction.
I was thrilled to see him again with his wife on the beach, or posing with the children at a summer camp.
Discreet, almost erased, dressed in his two-piece suit.
»
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Each episode has its point of view: the torments of Pope Paul VI, close to the pious Moro who is trying to intercede, the dignity of his wife Eleonora Moro, the doubts of his captor Adriana Faranda or even the terror of his spiritual son and Minister of the Interior, Francesco Cossiga, forced to align himself with the position of the Italian government.
Refusing to negotiate with the terrorists for fear of endangering democracy, the President of the Council, Giulio Andreotti, did not give in on anything, leading to the death of his colleague.
sacrificial hero
In France, the expression “Years of lead” is familiar.
But
Esterno notte
makes palpable the darkness and the oppressive violence of this time on the other side of the Alps.
If the shadow of Moro runs through the work of Bellocchio and his fellow filmmakers to such an extent, it is because modern Italy is still paying for this original sin.
“The major parties, especially the Christian Democracy, have been plunged into crisis.
Italian policy gradually changed.
The parliamentary system has been weakened.
The ground was fertile for the appearance of new forces
,” laments the octogenarian filmmaker.
Starting from the most exact facts, the most sordid negotiations, Marco Bellocchio injects his dark poetry and his poisonous tragedy.
Fantasy slips through the interstices of reality.
Assailed by nightmarish visions and bad omens, Cossiga becomes a Shakespearean hero, haunted, like Hamlet, by the blood he thinks he sees on his hands.
The most cruel of these hallucinations?
The one where he imagines an Aldo Moro, barely saved, exhausted in his hospital bed.
Giulio Andreotti is sometimes filmed as a small mafia clan leader, sometimes derided, grotesque and impotent puppet.
Guilty of having wanted to make a compromise with the Communist Party, Moro turns into a sacrificial and Christlike hero, victim of the cowardice of his party which invokes reason of state to block any attempt at liberation.
His disarray in the face of this abandonment, this painful revolt makes him discover another inner self.
The actor Fabrizio Gifuni, who had already performed it on two other occasions, embodies it here with overwhelming grace.