ALESSANDRO BORGHI IN BATTLEGROUND/CAMPO DI BATTAGLIA

OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - GIANNI AMELIO: BATTLEGROUND (2024)

An earnest anti-war picture that fails to come to life

Gianni Amelio’s sober First World War drama is an issue picture whose anti-war concerns are of eternal relevance. There is no question about the film's good intentions and the commitment of the lead performances. How unfortunate, then, that the action drags, the mood is torpid, and that the mise-en-scène is weak on detail. Wendy Ide's summary analysis in Screen Daily is that while Amelio's tale has "a humanistic empathy" - and it has that in spades, there is a "somewhat disjoinnted storytelling" so that the film's "flow is repeatedly disrupted." In other words there is no rhythm or strong forward movement.

Jordan Mintzer in Hollywood Reporter calls this film "sober but overly academic." Jessica Kiang in Variety is if anything even harsher, calling this a "turgid medical drama" and a "drab period picture" that is "stultifyingly serious."

Amelio was impressive in his 1992 The Stolen Children and 1994 Lamerica and touching in his 2001 Così ridevano and 2004 Le chiavi di casa, but has been a letdown since. In Open Roads two years ago, his Lord of the AntsI was an interesting recreation of a court case showing Italy's uneasy relationship with homosexuality, but it got a stilted treatment. The same is true here, only worse, becaause Amelio has set himself a greater task and fallen further short.

We are conronted here with heavy ethical issues. It's the end of World War I at a northern Italian military hospital where three companions of youth and fellow medical school students are thrown together amid an unwieldy number of desperate patients whose horror of returning to battle seems often greater than their nonetheless awful injuries. And then it all becomes irrelevant when as the war winds down the Spanish flu pandemic takes over and wipes out everybody.

There are some colorful and disturbing patients seen early in the film, desperate, shell-shocked individuals, shattered and shivering, and a man blinded in one eye who appears willing to be blinded in the other to insure being sent home instead of back to the front. There is a stark dichotomy between the two doctors the film follows, along with a nurse whose presence brings out other isssues. They have all been in medical school together. Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) is from a well-off background, patriotic, wants only to send back his patients quickly to the front. Giulio (Alessandro Borghi) is from a modest family and hates war, and is ready to break the rules, even commit treason, for the terrorized patients. One understands Giulio's guilt at the idea of sending impoverished and illiterate southern Italian men back to battle when he himself haas evaded combat.

Both seem rather stiff individuals in Amelio's vdrsion of 1918 medical men. Perhaps the woman sent to help them is meant to loosen things up with romance as well as a feminine point of view. It seems both men are interested in Anna (Federica Rosellini), who was brilliant in medical school and shouldn't be just a nurse but was derailed to that status by a sexist system. She however is just as stolid a character as the two doctors.

Giulio is a bacteria specialist, which makes him more of an expert when the pandemic sweeps in. But his most notable activity is that in a little space ostensibly set aside for his test tube work, he has set up a surgery theater, and here he administers unnecessary or only marginally necessary amputations or venereal disease infections to insure that soldiers terrified of returning to battle will not have to. Is Giulo meant to be noble or is he something of a creep? In any case this storyline feels distinctly creepy. Both self-inflicted and medical-assisted injuries to escape combat duty are a repulsive prospect. But then we have not seen what the kiling fields of World War I combat duty looked like.

While the slow, jerky action and almost zombie-like solemnity of the leads here are distracting enough to make a critic as restrained as Jessica Kiang call the action "turgid," there is also a lack of medical detail, or specificity in the day to day war action. What is detailed is the prostetics for amputations and the makeup department's range of suppurating lesions, crusting and oozing eye infections and gangrenous wounds wrapped in torn, disintegrating bandages. It would have been nice to see one thing done right. The impression is that all Italian medicine had to offer at this point was beds.

It is hard to know how to take Giulio. His interventions to make patients worse so they may be sent home leads to the execution by firing squad of at least one of his patients, which we witness. Somewhat implausibly, Stefano takes quite a while to figure out that Gilulo is the "Holy Hand" intervening to save soldiers from fighting and return them maimed to their humble farms or other labor.

It feels that Amelio's involvement in the moral and ethical issues here overwhelmed his command of the environment and the historical situation. This film's screenplay by Amelio and usual collaborator Alberto Taraglio is loosely based on the popular recent novel La Sfida/The Challenge by doctor-author Carlo Patriarca. In the book all this may work better; I have not read it.

Battlefield/Campo di battaglia, 104 mins., premiered Agu. 31, 2024 at Venice, showing also at Rio, Madrid, and Argentina festivals. Screened for this review as part of Open Roads, the Italian film festival at Lincoln Center, New York (May 31-Jun.5, 2025. Showtimes:
]Monday, June 2 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, June 4 at 1:30pm

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