31/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Gianni Amelio offers up a sharp historical film with unmistakeable references to the present day

Alessandro Borghi in Battlefield

A battlefield divided in two, two wars fought on two fronts, both overwhelmed in the face of horror and death. Gianni Amelio is in the running for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for the eighth time thanks to Battlefield [+see also:
trailer
interview: Gianni Amelio
film profile], a historical feature film which is as sharp as the surgical instruments used by the movie’s two protagonists and whose references to the present day are unmistakeably clear.

The film is set in a military hospital in northern Italy in 1918, in the months leading up to the end of the First World War, where wounded soldiers from the front come together. Here, two medical officers work tirelessly, bound by a deep friendship. Stefano (Gabriel Montesi) - the son of a powerful retired officer who saved him from the front and who wants him to have a future in politics – is uncompromising when it comes to the many soldiers who are there because of self-inflicted wounds.  "You can fight with one hand!" he says, before sending a young man, terrorised by the slaughter he’d witnessed in the mountains, back to the front.  The other officer is Giulio (Alessandro Borghi), with his weary expression and resigned smile, who’s an excellent biology researcher and who is now secretly helping these men hurting themselves, often either aggravating their wounds or amputating their limbs: “it’s better to go home an invalid than face certain death on the front”. Things are shaken up by the arrival of Anna (Federica Rosellini), their university friend whose career has been cut short owing to the misogyny of her university professors and who is now a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross. The young woman ultimately works out what Giulio is up to, and unwittingly sends a soldier to be sacrificed before the firing squad to set an example for the others.

The atrocity of war isn’t depicted directly in this film, whose screenplay - penned by the director himself - is loosely based on Carlo Patriarca’s novel, La Sfida. But you can see it in the soldiers’ eyes and hear it in the fragmented tales told in many different Italian dialects, which are often intelligible to the doctors. The film reaches a turning point half-way through when the Great War is ending and the camera shifts focus onto another folly. First the general population and then the soldiers are struck down by an influenza which swiftly leads to death: it’s none other than the great Spanish Flu epidemic, the most devastating in history (claiming 50 million victims in the world, 600,000 in Italy alone). Amelio reveals the disinterest of the upper military echelons, the censorship carried out in the press, and the young biologist’s feverish work to find a cure, even if it costs him his own life.

But there are no obvious heroes in Battlefield, nor the usual romanticism or epic nature of war cinema. Amelio’s poetic foray into historical material also excludes potential romantic relationships, and he keeps the development of his main characters to a minimum, instead directing our gaze towards the collective drama by way of the grey-blue bruised filter used by director of photography Luan Amelio Ujkaj. The film’s crowded corridors and the masks worn by the doctors and soldiers are highly expressive, taking us back to the recent times of Covid-19. Battlefield is a film which decrypts history in order to explore different potential meanings and truths, not only making it visible but also preserving its memory, as observed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Battlefield was produced by Kavac, IBC Movie and OneArt in league with RAI Cinema. RAI Cinema International Distribution are overseeing world sales.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 31/08/2024: Venice 2024 - Campo di battaglia

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Gianni Amelio, Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini
© 2024 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it