Good Morning, Night film review

certificate_15

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (BOUNGIORNO, NOTTE)

Chiara leads a quiet life. She works as a librarian, is recently married and has moved into a new apartment with her husband. At that that's how Chiara wants to be seen. What nobody knows, is that she is a member of one of the world's most feared terrorist groups who have kidnapped the President of their country and are holding him hostage in their basement.

Such is the ingenious premise of Mario Bellocchio's new film Good Morning, Night, which has its UK premiere at the 2003 London Film Festival. Already hailed in Italy, where it won a number of prizes at the Venice Film Festival, the film depicts real-life events in Italy in 1978 when the Red Brigade kidnapped and eventually murdered the then Prime Minister. Aldo Moro's death may not have resulted in a change - Italy's post-war electoral instability lasted well into the 1990s - but it was a defining moment for Italians that lived through it.

Bellocchio, who also wrote the script, intentionally fictionalises some of the events in order to avoid being constantly corrected on factual errors. This is a neat trick and allows his creativity to come to the fore. Newsreel footage from the time is used continually, giving a part-documentary feel, but the central action takes place in the kidnappers' bolthole, where an erudite and humble Moro (Herlitzka) gently argues his case for clemency with an increasingly fractured terrorist cell.

There is plenty of engrossing detail in the planning and execution of the event: the preparation of Moro's last room, the need for the terrorists to maintain some façade of real-life (notably in Chiara's job at the university) while the country is gripped in panic. Try as he might to give the terrorists some credence, the ensemble group has ill-defined ambitions loosely based on demolishing the class system.

As the kidnappers monitor the television to see if there is any public sympathy for their cause (there isn't), tempers inevitably fray and plans and rhetoric change. Bellocchio uses dream sequences to illustrate Chiara's disenchantment with the plan to murder Moro and her own ideas to free him.

Despite focusing on events in the past, the film seems very timely: the sheer interest in how a terrorist cell works should broaden the appeal outside Italy of this tightly constructed picture. One curious note however is the soundtrack: the director's continual use of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, pleasant as it is, seems at odds with much of the onscreen action.