An attempt to weld the personal and the political

This new film gives flesh and bones to the economic turning point that happened in the early Eighties when workers were defeated at the FIAT plant in Turin. Twenty-four thousand layoffs followed a the factory, with many more elsewehre, and a life of downsizing and diminished union power followed throughout the West--a world to be increasinlgy dominated by the likes of Reagon, Thatcher, and ever-growing corporate power. In Italy, the communist party (PCI) was ultimately to vanish, and the way was paved in the country for Berlusconi and his billionaire's media-based Forza Italia. Director Wilma Labate makes extensive use of archival footage of the labor struggle that ensued after workers initially learned of the planned firing of 14,000 FIAT employees. She also generally recreates the period with clothing, hairstyles, music, even Rubik's Cubes, and tells a story of a group of people torn by conflicting loyalties and backgrounds.

The love story for which all this is the setting is almost inevitably a bit overwhelmed. It's indeed hard to know what personal narrative wouldln't be swept away by such a powerful historical moment, but the romance between Emma Martano (Valeria Solarino, who also appears in the Open Roads Waltz) and Sergio (Filippo Timi, of Saturn in Opposition and last year's Open Roads In Memory of Me), however hot while it lasts, certainly isn't intense enough to seem compelling. A comparison with Laurent Cantet's film about a family torn by labor-mangement struggles suggests that Ms. F. didn't even need a romance to make it come alive, and in fact loses momentum by introducing that element.

Emma is from an originally southern working-class family long resident in Turin, but as the story beings, she's deeply involved with an engineer and FIAT manager, Silvio (Fabrizio Gifuni, who also appears in The Girl by the Lake and The Sweet and the Bitter). She's also a brilliant mathematics student and through the help of Silvio is being set up in a high tech job at the factory at the managerial level herself. But just as the workers' strike is getting under way, she has a rough encounter with the bearded, earthy Sergio, who symbolically traps her in the work floor and dirties her blouse. On Sunday Sergio goes to dinner with a family to meet Magda (Sabrina Impacciatore), who's eligible. Impetuously, his roomate Antonio (Fausto Paravidino) comes along, and he immediately links up with Magda even though he's much younger; not longer after he declares that he weants to marry her and have "thousands" of kids. This turns out to be Emma's family, and the hot, combative relationship continues, with Sergio as quickly as Antonio declaring his passion for her.

Sergio is a leader of the strikes. Emma's boyfriend isn't a pro-management pig: he's actually hostile to a meeting of managers declaring their intion of backing the brutal firings, and walks out. Nonetheless when the strikes begin, he sneaks in early in the morning with other managers supporting the scab effort. It's actually Emma's father (Giorgio Colangeli) that she's most in conflict, though. He dates from a time, apparenlty, when the only good was to work and better oneself, whatever the physical and psychological cost, as he delcares in a scene.

The idea is that in the "chaos" of the strikes, which Antioni declares exhilerating--this is a wonderful period for him, his whole life seems to be opening up to him--Emma is drawn to the excitement and energy of the workers and simultaneously to Sergio as the embodiment of that spirit. But she's inwardly conflicted, not only because of her father's essential oppositon to the shutdowns, but her love for Silvio, which hasn't evaporated. She's on and off with Sergio.

The trouble is that Ms. F. makes the conflict at FIAT Fiat Mirafiori seem just passions and flirting--with big closeups to dramatize the romances, the sexy Sergio, the cool, driven Emma. The screenplay gets bogged down in its effort to provide the plotline as some kind of objective correlative for the management-labor struggle, while at the same time toward the end of the film increasingly giving way to detailed presentation of the actual events through the archival footage. However charismatic the stars are--and everybody's good here, including notably Impacciatore and Paravidino--and hoever dramatic the closeups, their presence seems oddly peripheral, even though they're obviously meant to be central.

One can contrast this with Laurent Cantet's remarkable 1999 feature Human Resources, which concernsd a young man from a factory worker family who returns from Paris with special training that makes him enter at the management level at the very place his dad has humbly strived for decades. When again a downsizing layoff wave threatens and inside information shows the young man how cynical and cruel lmanagement is he detaches from his father, who like Emma's has a relatively regressive attitude toward workers' rights, and joins the strike, while his father tries to be a scab. The result is a story that is at once much more political and much more personal and gut-wrenching--without the need for any romances. In the light of the success of Human Resources as a powerful labor-management story that is intensely personal, Ms. F.--despite being well-meaning, well-researched, and well-cast--seems wrongly conceived.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.