“Vincere” played tonight as part of the Telluride festival at Dartmouth. Although it is challenging getting tickets when the sales first open, the 9 pm shows usually have space. Tonight’s was about 2/3 full, but Bright Star tomorrow night is sold out.
I had vague memories of Mussolini and his mistress, mainly that they were killed by a mob near the end of the war, hung upside down, and I assumed that this movie was somehow about that.
The title means “to win” in Italian, and it follows the life of Ida Dalser starting in 1914, when she first meets Mussolini. She later becomes his mistress, bears his son. The movie is compelling and beautifully filmed, with lots of gray and darkness. The young Mussolini is charismatic and dynamic, and she falls hard for him. However, after a son is born, he shuns her. Her strenuous efforts for his attention only get her in trouble, and she gets sequestered away in scary mental hospitals tended by grim nuns. Her son is taken from her, and sent to military school. We never see the older Mussolini again in the movie, except indirectly via newsreels footage. Some of the newsreel interludes were newspaper headlines or posters, and some seemed a bit strange and incongruous, but perhaps that was the intention.
Although it isn’t made explicit in the movie, Ida claims that she is married, and that Mussolini had acknowledged his son. However, the movie seems to portray Mussolini as married earlier to Rachele, and as having a daughter. The implication is that in order to ascend to power and have a respectable family life, he can’t be seen to have had a mistress or a son. And certainly his henchmen make sure that any records of Ida are eliminated.
So it turns out that this is a completely different story that what I had thought, and doesn’t really have much to do with WWII, but instead more with WWI. Mussolini was killed by partisans, but he was with some other mistress at the time.
But it doesn’t really matter – the film stands on its own – and especially the great acting of the two leads as Ida Dalser and young Mussolini.