San Giovanni Rotondo, end of the Great War; women wait for their men, some return sick, maimed, some will never return.

Poverty forces slave labor while landowners hold economic and political power.

Parallel to this reality, in an austere Capuchin monastery, Padre Pio begins his ministry, with his famous austere, confrontational and mysterious manner. Absorbed completely by mystical and diabolic visions he is accompanied by confrontations with his own disturbances, guilt, obsessions, fixations, delusions, and restlessness between the inhuman and the divine.

The campaign preceding the first free elections in Italy, promoted by the few who were fortunate enough to measure themselves with literacy rides on the extreme misery of agricultural laborers, their working and living conditions.

On the walls a portrait of Marx, talk of revolution quoting Lenin and Trotsky while the country's landowners practiced counteroffensive by having their weapons blessed by conniving clergymen.

With World War I over, the social, economic and political war has just begun, and Abel Ferrara depicts an almost unknown event: the October 14, 1920 massacre in San Giovanni Rotondo, the most violent massacre of the Red Two Years in Italy, in which 60 people were wounded and thirteen socialists and one carabiniere died.

The director, who does not acknowledge any real participation in the blockade or bundle of order of the Arditi di Cristo, followers of the friar, to Padre Pio, who was too busy attending to his "soul," nevertheless recognizes the responsibility of the Capitanata bourgeoisie and the public force that moved with the intention of repressing the socialist movement in the areas where it was most deeply rooted, and stresses the need to make the roots of fascism known in depth, along with the memory of those pioneers of democracy slaughtered by a reactionary and despotic power.

The absolutely parallel track of Abel Ferrara's directorial conduction, between the life of the village and the monastic life of the friar , never intersecting except for strictly geographic/temporal matters, decisively indicates the need to present the two stories exactly as two straight lines that in order to be said to be parallel must belong to the same plane and must have no point in common.

The intent is to show an external world, that of the village, desperate, tragic and conflicted and an internal world, that of the friar, narcissistic, schizophrenic and tormented.

From the ferocity of reality to the psychopathology of "truth."

The spoiled child whose conscious alter ego accuses him of cowardly avoiding war through multiple licenses; the poor health, the violent physical and spiritual crises, the delusions, the episodes of hyperthermia and bilocation, as well as the aggression of demons that leave marks on his battered flesh, the torment and the daily battle with the evil one, draw the life of the Pious Capuchin, known and skillfully portrayed by Abel Ferrara, while outside the convent the social warfare becomes violent and ruthless.

But how much is direct non-responsibility for the massacre, as in this case, actually an alternative j'accuse against a man considered by many to be fierce, violent and tormented and focused only on himself?

After all, what is faith if not "paradox and scandal" as Kierkegaard teaches? And Pius' life was marked by incredible and bewildering, scabrous and exaggerated actions and events.

For the friar, the sinner is the one who has doubts and for that he should be cast out; for power, the enemy is the one who questions the status quo and for that he should be condemned.

The schizophrenia of political/economic/ecclesiastical power is the imposition of the schism between those who presume to possess the last word and those who would claim to question it.

The director's disbelieving mastery grants the benefit of the doubt to direct responsibility over the facts but grants no absolution to the man of altar pulpit and confession, drawing him paranoidly and selfishly hunched over himself, doomed by his own pathological narcissism.

06-Jul-2023 by Beatrice