I want
the audience to be seduced’: Joe Wright on his Mussolini biopic
This article
is more than 1 month old
Philip
Oltermann European culture editor
Atonement
director hopes viewers get swept along by M: Son of the Century as ‘to demonise
these characters absolves us of moral responsibility’
Philip
Oltermann
Sat 17 Aug
2024 06.00 CEST
He built up
violent paramilitary gangs and terrorised political opponents, suspended
democracy in favour of a dictatorship that would inspire nazism, and plunged
his country into a bloody war.
But a major
new biographical series about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dares us to
feel sympathy for the bull-necked creator of fascism, if only to demonstrate
his diabolical charm.
In a first
interview about his series M: Son of the Century, the British director Joe
Wright told the Guardian: “What I hoped to do in the show is sometimes allow
the audience to be seduced by Mussolini and to get excited by what he’s doing.
“To demonise
these characters absolves us of moral responsibility and I think that’s really,
really dangerous,” added Wright, who is best known for the period dramas
Atonement and Pride and Prejudice.
The
eight-part biopic will premiere at the Venice film festival on 5 September
before being released by Sky next spring. It does not so much analyse fascism’s
origins as dunk the viewer straight into the bath of blood, sweat and male
testosterone that gave rise to the cult around the man his followers called Il
Duce.
Mussolini, a
former editor of the Italian Socialist party’s official newspaper who fell out
with the left over his support for the first world war, is shown as a morally
corrupt individual, but also as a canny political operator who is able to
temper his taste for violence for strategic gains.
The torchlit
night-time rallies of the brutish and black-shirted fascisti are underscored by
an intoxicating techno soundtrack courtesy of Tom Rowlands, one half of the
British electronic music duo the Chemical Brothers. Stylistically, Wright said,
the serial biopic had become “a mashup of Scarface, Man With a Movie Camera and
90s rave culture”.
The series
makers say that if there are moments where viewers catch themselves being swept
along by the propulsive energy of the politician’s rise to power, that is
precisely what they intended.
In Italy,
the series is certain to touch a nerve. M is based on the first instalment of
Antonio Scurati’s “documentary novel” by the same name, a 2019 winner of the
prestigious Premio Strega book award that has sold more than 600,000 copies
worldwide but divided critical opinion at home.
While some
reviewers, such as Luca Mastrantonio on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera,
praised the book as a “literary inoculation” against the return of fascism,
others have suggested that Scurati’s focus on Mussolini’s biography has
inadvertently helped normalise the founding father of fascism and his ideas.
Ruth
Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University, has described
M’s project of revitalising anti-fascism by immersing the reader in fascism’s
cult of brutish male power as “paradoxical”.
Evidence of
its inoculating effect has yet to materialise. Since the publication of the
first part of Scurati’s series in 2018, Italy has elected its most rightwing
government since the second world war, led by a prime minister, Giorgia Meloni,
whose Brothers of Italy party has neofascist origins – even if she is at pains
to distance herself from what she has called “the cult of fascism”.
Speaking to
the Guardian, Scurati nonetheless insisted that in order to strengthen
anti-fascism, stories about the movement’s historical roots could no longer
rely purely on the point of view of those it persecuted.
“The reason
why I started writing on Mussolini all those years ago was because I felt an
urgent need to break what I call the victim paradigm,” he said. “I am fully
convinced that Italy and Europe will never fully come to terms with fascism if
we neglect to address a fundamental fact: we were fascists. All of us were
seduced. We have to feel accountable for that chapter in our history.”
Scurati’s
painstakingly researched “documentary novels” – the third instalment of which,
M: The Last Days of Europe, was published in 2022 – tries to stop the reader
being sucked too deeply into Mussolini’s toxic psychology by juxtaposing
fictionalised monologues with archive documents, such as newspaper articles and
secret police reports.
“I somehow
created a new fictional method that had little to do with fiction,” Scurati
said. “I relinquished all the tools a writer can use to describe Mussolini’s
emotions.”
Wright’s
series, with a screenplay by the Gomorrah scriptwriter Stefano Bises and Davide
Serino, opts for a different, more high-risk strategy: “to build that empathy
and then to pull the rug out and say ‘Wait a minute, do you realise what you’re
engaging with?’”, as the director described it.
Throughout
M, the actor Luca Marinelli’s buffoonish Mussolini breaks the fourth wall to
speak directly to the audience, inviting them to join his cause: “Follow me,
you’ll love me too. I’ll make you a fascist.”
While M: Son
of the Century is not the first screen portrait of the Italian dictator,
previous films have mostly focused on figures on Il Duce’s periphery, such as
his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini and I), or his first wife, Ida Dalser
(Vincere). A 1993 TV mini-series with Antonio Banderas as the titular
protagonist, Benito: The Rise and Fall of Mussolini, drew criticism for
romanticising the strongman leader.
Reviving the
deadly dictators of Europe’s 20th century on screen continues to be seen as a
risky artistic enterprise. The German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall
broke taboos around the filmic depiction of the man who adopted and adapted
Mussolini’s brand of fascism, Adolf Hitler, but was strongly criticised by
film-maker colleagues. In an article for newspaper Die Zeit, the German
director Wim Wenders accused Downfall of being inexcusably neutral towards
Hitler by declining to show his dead body.
Asked
whether he could imagine making a similar series about Hitler, Wright said:
“I’ve no idea. I don’t really know how to answer that.”
The taut
moral arc of M: Son of the Century leads from Mussolini’s start as a
rabble-rousing underdog in Milan’s tavernas to a pivotal moment in June 1924,
when his career came close to being ended over the death of the socialist
leader Giacomo Matteotti, who had been kidnapped and murdered by fascist
paramilitaries.
Facing an
outraged parliament, Mussolini took responsibility for the murder as head of
the fascist party and dared his critics to prosecute him. By failing to seize
the opportunity, they enabled Italy’s descent into a full dictatorship.
When
originally conceiving of the series, Wright said the plan was to have
Mussolini’s dialogue in Italian, but the direct addresses to the camera in
English.
He abandoned
the plan after Meloni took office in October 2022. “At that point,” he said,
“we decided that I wanted every single Italian to understand every single
word.”
This article was amended on 18 August 2024
because an earlier version mistakenly gave Benito Mussolini’s birthplace as
Milan. He was born in the small Italian town of Predappio.
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