It starts from the end...

Archival footage... the death of Mussolini, while he states, you killed me because you loved me too much.

From D’Annunzio and Fiume to advancing history.

A series of failures, from socialism to Avanti, from the arditi to fascism.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at the home of Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish art critic, married to the socialist lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, lover and mentor of the future Italian fascist dictator.

The arditi aimed to turn fear into hate, violence was the means.

While an extraordinary Mussolini (Luca Marinelli) interfaces with the viewer, with his expressions, insults, slogans, demagogies: he supports everything and the opposite of everything, because the goal is power, and the means, anything.

History is made starting from the last ones... bombs and revolvers are stirred up... we are the synthesis of all affirmations and all negations.

Two Mussolinis fighting against each other multiply. Violence must no longer be gratuitous but reasoned, and managing the arditi becomes increasingly difficult, especially when the inputs are contradictory.

From Nitti to Giolitti, politics betrays itself, while Mussolini betrays everyone, including himself, because everyone is right: this is the political strategy of a reasonable and respectable fascist!

Make Italy great again!

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, born on July 29, 1883, to Rosa Maltoni and Alessandro Mussolini, was against everything, including the church and elections, but fascism, as we know, is everything and the opposite of everything.

Democracy is beautiful, it gives you lots of freedom, including the freedom to destroy it, indeed we will abolish it.

Against the backdrop of an enlargement of Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, Mussolini negotiates with the church on various issues; a fake arm-wrestling that Mussolini has already won, first with the King then with the Vatican.

Also because his Non Expedit is the looming threat, and it's not convenient for anyone: reasoned violence can turn into gratuitous violence in an instant...

Orgiastic party

Fascist machismo

Elections: voting fascist must be the solution to all evils.

Who do we send to parliament? 360 seats and we don’t have 360 decent candidates: let’s face it... fascists are what they are...

We open the list to everyone but on our terms: humanity is disgusting.

"When pessimism grips you, you are more unbearable than when you feel like God," words from Margherita.

With the golden leash around his neck handed by the king, Mussolini is the emblem of vulgarity and crudeness, with a childish obsession with being loved by everyone.

In 1932, during an interview with journalist and writer Emil Ludwig, Benito Mussolini declared that women must obey, that his opinion on their role in the State was opposed to any feminism, and that in the fascist State they must not count.

Yet he had many women, and his animalistic attitude of sexual domination is perfectly portrayed by the series.

Misogynistic and chauvinistic, he resorted to predatory sexuality: "no woman will enjoy intimacy with me because as soon as I’m done, I quickly look for my hat."

If his weakness is to please everyone, he must do so with women as well, to be used according to tastes, functions, different contexts; the poor first wife Ida Dalser, kidnapped on the road, bound, drugged, battered, dragged to the asylum in Pergine.

From Mussolini’s end, from his socialist beginnings to the Matteotti murder; Joe Wright puts together a compelling puzzle of environments, photography, performances, dialogues, insights, jokes, slogans, and music composed by Tom Rowlands.

A deafening, entertaining, and thrilling rhythm runs through the obsession and paranoia of a man for power, the ultimate goal of his psychophysical condition.

An insane, incredible portrait of a male encountering an inadequate and incompetent political system, incapable of identifying him, preventing him, a fertile and submissive Italy, unable to contain a terrifying and uncontrollable phenomenon, the identity of a fascism overwhelming in its unintended comedy.

It ends with Mussolini’s Speech on the Matteotti murder of January 3, 1925.

Mussolini assumed "the political, moral, and historical responsibility" for what had happened in Italy in recent months, and specifically for the Matteotti murder, but at the same time distanced himself from it by describing it as the consequence of the violent political climate of Italy in those years.

Gentlemen! The speech I am about to give before you may perhaps not strictly be classified as a parliamentary speech. It may be that at the end someone will find that this speech connects, even if through the passage of time, to the one I gave in this very chamber on November 16. Such a speech may lead to a political vote, or it may not. In any case, let it be known that I do not seek this political vote. I do not desire it: I have had too many. Article 47 of the Statute says: "The Chamber of Deputies has the right to accuse the ministers of the king and bring them before the High Court of Justice." I formally ask whether in this Chamber, or outside it, there is anyone who wishes to make use of Article 47.

Thus closes the last chapter of the series, with Mussolini/Marinelli looking into the camera saying: Silence...

Exactly as, inconceivably, things went, this is history.

An objective, spectacular reconstruction, a surprising blockbuster about a farce that became a tragedy, about a character who was never a person, with grotesque mimicry, exuberant gestures, destroyer, flatterer, chameleon, surrounded by violent buffoons, a cowardly and inept politics, a people atavistically subservient and vassal.

You cannot escape what you are, even by disguising yourself: a fatal destiny.

Unmissable!

07-Sep-2024 by Beatrice