Dir: Marco Tullio Giordana. Italy-France. 2008. 148mins .
A grandly-mounted but turgid prestige piece, Wild Blood attempts to give tragic heft to the lives of two of Italian cinema’s more disreputable figures. Writer-director Marco Tullio Giordana won considerable kudos in 2003 with The Best Of Youth, but Wild Blood is a creakily traditional, anonymous World War II drama. Its story of right-wing figures laid low may garner some moderate international interest in the wake of Downfall’s success, but the film’s overall laboriousness and very local historical references won’t help sales. As long as star Monica Bellucci is willing to travel, however, the film is destined for gala slots in more conservativefestivals.
From its hokey black-and-white prologue - two urchins stumble on a discarded reel of celluloid in the ruins of Milan - the film is a pompous grind. It tells the true-life story of Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida, screen stars of the Fascist era. The narrative begins in Milan in 1945, with Valenti (Zingaretti), by now a militia lieutenant, going to plead with a partisan group led by his old friend Golfiero Goffredi (Boni), who promises to secure the couple a trial rather than summary execution. The film then zigzags between the ruined couple’s spell in hiding and their glory days, beginning in 1936 Rome, when established star Valenti, a womanising loudmouth, first meets Ferida (Bellucci), a young extra desperate for success.
Ferida gets her break thanks to film-maker Goffredi, a homosexual aristocrat whose anti-Facist allegiances make him persona non grata under Mussolini. She and Goffredi develop a platonic tenderness, but she attaches herself to the flamboyant, drug-addicted Valenti, their histrionic tendencies - and propensity to ignore political reality in favour of advancement - making them a natural match. Both actors flourish under Mussolini, but their downfall begins when they head west in 1943, as Italy’s film industry abandons Rome for Venice. They then fall into the malign company of Italian SS office r Pietro Koch (Bonanni), a volatile sadist who, the film suggests, coerced the couple into the crimes that were held against them.
While the film stints little on elaborate period reconstruction, it largely comes across as a pedestrian history lesson, with little real insight given into its characters’ motivations: you could easily come away feeling that Ferida and Valenti are just your average showbiz monsters born in the wrong time and the wrong place. Giordana lacks the necessary flamboyance for such a drama, and Wild Blood comes across as a shadow of such provocative films as The Conformist or Mephisto.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story remains implicit but inescapable: the parallel between the actor couple’s eventual fate, and the come-uppance of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. But Wild Blood finally fails either to make us care for its self-serving, hollow characters, or to make us see why their story deserves the tragic scope that Giordana seemingly aims at. Bellucci is woodenly stately; she is too much the grande dame from the start to convince as the hustling young Ferida, who would have been in her early 20s when the story begins. What does give the film some buoyancy, however, is an energetic performance by Zingaretti, playing an abject opportunist.
Production companies
Bibi Film TV SRL
Paradis Films
Producer
Angelo Barbagallo
Screen play
Leone Colonna
Marco Tullio Giordana
Enzo Ungari
Cinematography
Roberto Forza
Production design
Giancarlo Basili
Editing
Roberto Missiroli
Music
Franco Piersanti
Main cast
Monica Bellucci
Luca Zingaretti
Alessio Boni
Maurizio Donadoni
Giovanni Visentin
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