‘Battleground’: Venice Review

Dir: Gianni Amelio. Italy. 2024. 103mins

Many of the Italian infantrymen who pass through the military hospital wards where childhood friends Giulio (Alessandro Borghi) and Stefano (Gabriel Montesi) work have been seriously maimed in combat. Others present injuries that may have been self-inflicted. Most would consider pretty much anything rather than be sent back to the frontline. Gianni Amelio’s sober First World War drama follows medical professionals who, having stepped up to do their duty, find themselves forced to negotiate an ethical minefield. And that’s before the Spanish flu starts to rip through the population. Amelio brings a humanistic empathy to the picture, but the somewhat disjointed storytelling means that the film’s flow is repeatedly disrupted.

 Battleground is a solid, competently executed war film, although the sheer volume of human suffering on show does make for an unrelentingly bleak viewing experience

The latest film from veteran filmmaker Amelio, Battleground is the eighth of the director’s pictures to premiere in the main Competition at Venice (he took home the Golden Lion with The Way We Laughed in 1998). Loosely based on the novel ’La Sfida’ by Carlo Patriarca, Battleground is a solid, competently executed war film, although the sheer volume of human suffering on show does make for an unrelentingly bleak viewing experience. More of a concern, perhaps, is the pandemic plotline – it may be flu rather than Covid-19, but there are uneasy parallels, particularly in the early official resistance to acknowledging a problem. Pandemic pictures have proved to be a tricky marketing challenge for distributors, and there’s a chance that audiences might not wish to expose themselves to this much violent coughing.

One of the picture’s key assets is Borghi, who is on something of a roll following his memorable performance as a doomed and driven small-holder in Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, and a lead in Alejandro Amenabar’s forthcoming The Captive. His Giulio is a fascinating character. A reluctant doctor, he would prefer to be among test tubes and petri dishes as a research scientist. But he is dedicated to saving lives, albeit in an unconventional way.

Late at night, damaged young soldiers who are due to be sent back to the bloodshed are spirited out of the ward and shown to the operating theatre where Giulio waits to offer them a way out – loss of sight in a remaining eye, achieved by an injection of gonorrhoea; an amputation; temporary deafness. They are extreme measures, but these are desperate men. Borghi brings an intriguing complexity to this ideologically driven character – his voice is soft and soothing, but there’s also something serpentine and unsettling about it.

Giulio’s opposite, in demeanour and in his attitude to the “disgusting curs” who fail to do their duty to their country, is Stefano. An upright man, who brings to the bedside the black and white moral certainties that come with privilege, Stefano is rigorous and unsentimental in his job. He strides around the ward, dismissing bleeding, bandaged patients with the words, “For me, you are cured.” His role, as he sees it, is more about restocking the front line with cannon-fodder than it is about healing the sick. And yet, in his way, Stefano is principled and honest. A further complication comes when Anna (Federica Rosellini), an aspiring doctor whose gender and family poverty blocked her studies, volunteers as a Red Cross nurse. The unspoken competition between the two men extends to include her.

It’s a grimly evocative picture, with the colour palette in the ward dominated by a sour yellow tinge that suggests that the very air is tainted. The rumours about Giulio’s activities start to spread at around the same time as the Spanish flu takes hold. A couple of rather mannered and declamatory scenes tie the two together, symbolically sealing Giulio’s ultimate fate – together with that of over half a million of his fellow countrymen.