Bill

Another wonderful movie in Dartmouth’s Telluride festival lineup. And we learned that it opens at the Nugget next week, which is good news because it sold out for Telluride.

This movie is a love story between young consumptive poet John Keats and his neighbour’s daughter Fanny Brawne. It seems to be the same period as Jane Austen novels – and about the same upper middle class characters.  They live in big houses and have dancing lessons. But it is Fanny Prawne who dominates, with forthrightness and wit from the start. While following convention, it is always clear where her feelings lay. She sets the pace right at the opening scene, when she walks into the parlor, and has no problems dispensing with the cutting remarks of  their lodger, would-be poet Mr. Brown. This latter is the host of another would-be poet, John Keats, who with no family, no income and no poetry sales, is forced to live off of others.

Like the Austen novels, this is all about money. And the fact that Keats has none is a seemingly insurmountable barrier to any marriage, a fact that all the characters acknowledge. In spite of that, as the story progresses, they all seem to recognize and acquiesce to the special strength of the growing bond between John and Fanny.

The cast is all first rate – no weak links. The lighting is bright and luminous, and the scenery authentic.  The pace is measured and deliberate. Every details seems right in place. And be sure to stay through the closing credits to hear again “Ode to a Nightingale”, given special meaning by the story before it.

“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.