Con Battlefield Gianni Amelio signs his nineteenth film direction drawing free inspiration from the novel The challenge by Carlo Patriarca and staging the First World War seeking links with the contemporary, divided between the armed conflict and the advance of the disease – the Spanish flu in the case of the film. A fascinating idea that Amelio fails to manage, dispersing the potential in a chaotic second half, and depriving his characters of a real psychology.
Hygiene of the world
During the First World War, Stefano and Giulio are two childhood friends who work as medical officers in the same military hospital. In addition to their love for the same woman, the two are also divided between two opposing visions of their duty as doctors, when one of them begins to secretly worsen the conditions of the most seriously wounded so that they cannot be sent back to the front, to certain death. [sinossi]
There are two long take shots in the first part of Battlefield that seem to want to define better than any other rhetorical speculation the intimate meaning of what is the nineteenth film directed by Gianni Amelio for the cinema release. In the first one, the soldiers move in an abstract space, which is precisely the battlefield but is also a non-place dominated by death, with the bodies of the soldiers grotesquely stacked on top of each other to form little hills of blood and bones, and with their comrades who rob the corpses by snatching objects that could still have a value for those who live. From one of these piles of war victims suddenly emerges, like the hands that burst out towards the screen from underground in horror films, the limb of a soldier who is still alive, who will be able to tell his incredible adventure to other wounded while he is transported to the military hospital, the second and equally feral one battlefield. Yes, because here the bedridden soldiers are reviewed – with Amelio resorting for the second time to continuous shooting – with the frown of a captain who is preparing the troops for war by an inflexible man like Giulio, head of the hospital and a firm believer in the fact that anyone who is once again able to hold a rifle must be immediately sent back to the front, under penalty of being reported for desertion. Amelio makes the room move between the beds and camp beds with the same fluidity that he showed in the aforementioned sequence, as if to suggest that in wartime there is no real difference between those who are dead and those who, even if partially mutilated, are once again sent back to where the bullets fly. Cannabis fodder. The main theme of the film seems to be based on this analogy, which is as effective as it is simple, even more so when we understand that Lieutenant Stefano, another doctor at the military hospital, moves illegally at night to ensure that those who are about to be discharged – and therefore sent to a place from which it is difficult to return – suffer such an illness (artificially induced) that they will once again be forced to stay in bed, perhaps even to be discharged due to physical infirmity.
The ideological challenge between Stefano and Giulio (who ignores the behavior of his colleague and friend) is then multiplied to excess by other details: it was Giulio himself, the son of an important family, who saved Stefano from being sent to the battlefield, thanks to his father’s intercession; the two had been classmates at university, where Anna, the nurse – she did not graduate – also studied, who in turn reaches the hospital and renews a triangle that is perhaps love, perhaps purely geometric, representing the forces in the field. Amelio, who draws free inspiration from the novel The challenge by Carlo Patriarca, then writing the screenplay for the film together with Alberto Taraglio (already a faithful companion of the Calabrese director as witnessed So they laughed, Tendernesse Hammamet), is astute in suggesting a latent and never made explicit attraction between the two men, but is much less at ease when he has to handle the female character, both because of a certain interpretative fixity of Federica Rosellini, and because the figure of Anna appears blurry from the start, placed there only as bait to surface dilemmas and animosities that otherwise would not have been shown so easily. Through Anna, the difference in social weight of the time between male and female can be dismissed in one line, and by using her, the two antithetical visions of the war of the males on stage can be definitively detonated. All this, however, dulls the film, starting to reveal those narrative weaknesses that progressively take over. Because Amelio, most likely interested in tracing in what happened just over a century ago the fragments of meaning to read the contemporary as well – and after all war has never disappeared from the international chessboard – adds to the war event also the tragic influenza epidemic that went down in history as the “Spanish Flu”.
The war, the pandemic: a diptych that for example was also making its way in the beautiful The art of joy that a few months ago Valeria Golino deduced from the pages of Goliarda Sapienza. And yet in Battlefield the irruption in the second half of the virus turns into an obstacle, rather than an opportunity. If from a metaphorical point of view the reference to trust in science seems pleonastic, or perhaps simply too “easy”, narratively the film moves in directions that are far from convincing, and also quite confusing. Everything that Amelio had elegantly retained in the first part, also finding non-trivial intuitions – the infinite dialects spoken in the hospital, since soldiers who have faced death understand each other in any case –, loses significance, but also in a narrative sense: Stefano moved to work in close contact with sick soldiers to find a resolving serum, Anna who does not realize (how is it possible?) that reporting a soldier who is faking the disease means condemning him to death, another comrade who had passed himself off as crazy who treats Stefano – the man who saved him from returning to the front – in a contemptuous way by proposing an economic deal, all elements that risk shifting Battlefield on the side of involuntary ridicule, without the three characters on stage now relegated to mere functions having the strength to concentrate the audience’s attention on them. And it’s a shame, because the idea of overturning the futurist perspective of war as hygiene of the world in an ideal “hygiene of the world as war” could generate powerful reflections, here only occasionally suggested.
Info
Battlefield on the site of the Biennale.
