The 1970s feel like another world, when one Italian voter in three supported the Communist Party, political debate had genuine depth and people cared about collective wellbeing over individual gain. And it’s this period in Italian history and one of its most significant protagonists which are (finally) brought back to us on the big screen in The Great Ambition [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Andrea Segre’s new movie dedicated to the historic national secretary of the Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer. And it was with the same influx of crowds, the same flying of red flags and the same regret over lost ideologies that the 19th Rome Film Fest opened yesterday, hosting the film’s world premiere within the Progressive Cinema Competition.

It’s a movie which rests almost entirely on the broad shoulders of Elio Germano who steps into the shoes of the politician who shaped our country’s history. The film isn’t meant to be a traditional biopic, and it focuses on a specific period in time, between 1973 and 1978, when the secretary of the biggest communist party in the western world (with over one million, seven hundred thousand members and over 12 million votes) reached his peak and pursued his great ambition of reconciling socialism and democracy, attempting dialogue with the governing Christian Democracy party - the so-called “historic compromise” – in order to avoid a fall like Allende’s in Chile. From the time he escaped an attempt on the life of Christian Democracy president Aldo Moro in Sofia, as ordered by the Bulgarian secret services and carried out by the Red Brigades, and amidst party assemblies and meetings with workers (where the camera lingers on people’s faces as they hang on his every word), speeches in Parliament and trips to Moscow (where people don’t share his views), public life overlaps with private life (revolving around his wife Letizia, played by Elena Radonicich, and his four sons, with whom he engaged in passionate political debate) to paint the portrait of a man inhabited by his noble ideology, almost to the point of obsession.

A documentary filmmaker before turning his hand to fiction films, Segre has based his work on meticulous research carried out alongside his co-screenwriter Marco Pettenello, aimed at conveying Berlinguer’s thoughts and words, relying on biographies, interviews with his children, with relatives and with party colleagues, and transcriptions of the party directors’ meetings sourced from the Gramsci Institute. The result is a faithful and almost documentary-like reconstruction of the road which led towards the realisation of this great ambition (or great illusion) to bring about a fair society, smoothly incorporating archive footage used for either didactic or poetic purposes (thanks not least to Jacopo Quadri’s painstaking editing) and accompanied by Iosonouncane’s original music.

As for Germano (recently seen in Venice playing the part of mafioso Matteo Messina Denaro in Sicilian Letters [+lee también:
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entrevista: Fabio Grassadonia y Antoni…
ficha de la película]), who’s claimed victory at the David di Donatello Awards, in Cannes and in Berlin and who’s once again confirming his status as one of the best of his generation, the actor strips back the iconic figure of Berlinguer to convey his full weariness and seriousness, not to mention the burden of responsibility he bears, paying particular attention to physical posture and the smaller details. Giulio Andreotti played by Paolo Pierobon, who sidesteps mannerisms and excessive characterisation, and Aldo Moro played by Roberto Citran, a discreet and strategic man whose barbaric murder put an end to the dream to unite communists and Catholics at the helm of the country, are also deserving of a mention. Alas, all that remained following Berlinguer’s death at just 62 years of age following a stroke at a rally, were the silence and tears of his people. And our tears too, forty years later.

The Great Ambition was produced by Vivo film and Jolefilm together with RAI Cinema, in co-production with Tarantula (Belgium) and Agitprop (Bulgaria). The film will hit Italian cinemas on 31 October distributed by Lucky Red. World sales are entrusted to Fandango Sales.