Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2024


PIERFRANCESCO FAVINO IN EDOARDO DE ANGELIS' COMMANDANTE

Opening Night
EDOARDO DE ANGELIS: COMANDANTE (2023)

Owen Gleiberman's Variety review of Comandante from Venice describes an interesting, different kind of WWII submarine film, with less military, because grubby-undershirt-wearing, crew members, an introspective, poetic leader, and a narrative more about mood and quixotic fine gesture than maneuver. He reports himself disappointed because the filmmakers, instead of fleshing out characters and developing a weighty sense of drama, is bent solely on one project: being "the delivery system for a humanitarian message." This focus perhaps explains the film's opening the Venice festival (when Challengers was withdrawn due to union strikes) and now being the opener again, of the Lincoln Center Open Roads Italian series. But something isn't right here: though it may be after a true story, this becomes a war movie that never seems real or about war.

In the story, based on an actual incident early in the war, after sinking a Belgian merchant ship that attacks them, the Italian submarine Cappellini's captain, Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino) departs from partisanship to save the Belgian crew of the ship he has sunk. Nazis would let them drown; but we're Italian, so we save them, says the eccentric Captain Todaro. That's the message: save men in a desperate situation, even if they're likely to wind up being on the other side. (The Belgians hadn't officially declared yet at this point early in the war.) The director's stated message is "Salvatore knows the eternal laws that govern the sky and the sea and he knows that they are superior to any other law." This is "noble and upstanding," Gleiberman wrote, but "isn't enough to make it an exciting movie." Note also that to protect the Belgians, Tddaro at one point serously endangers his own men. It is "mildly stirring," Gleiberrman says, "but much of the movie just sort of lopes along."

Favino is always watchable, but he has both too much and too little to work with here. This is an eccentric part he can fly with, but it floats out into outer space. Better to watch him in something compelling and important like Marco Bellocchio's mafia informant story The Traitor/Il traditore (2019, NYFF), or Mario Martone's returning wanderer tale Nostalgia (NIC 2023). We never know quite what his captain in Comandante is going to do next. He's more a concept than a person.

This film is very operatic. You expect the men to burst into song, and eventually they do, led by the Neopolitan cook on a mandolin. After the stranded Belgians are taken on board and things are terribly crowded and food is running low, we would seem in for a grim ordeal. But no, the Belgians teach the cook how to make French fries (the Belgian national dish), and everybody laughs and has a good time. End titles inform us that the captain was killed in his sleep just as he predicted two years later (he had a reputation as a seer), while every crew member of the Belgian vessel survived the war. Dramatic though some of the scenes are, the whole film will live in the memory, if at all, only as an odd incident. It seems more a portrait of a very eccentric Italian Royal Navy submarine captain, Salvatore Todaro, than a picture of a noble action. There are good individual characters, but other than Todaro, they don't seem essential to the action.

The acting is good and so is the cinematography. The editing could have included clipping off fifteen minutes at the beginning about the captain and his wife that are arty and self-indulgent and simply unrelated. There is much that is engaging and intense and even sometimes beautiful here, but given the way it "lopes along," the two hours unwind somewhat slowly. But this is confident filmmaking with entertaining moments, as noted.

Edoardo De Angelis also directed The Vice of Hope, Open Roads 2019; and Indivisible, Open Roads 2017). There seems to be a move to replace the highly appropriate title for the anglophone market with "The War Machine" (based on one character's speech), perhaps to avoid confusion with Matteo Garrone's well-received more recent film Io Capitano.

Comandante, 120 mins., debuted at Venice Aug. 30, 2023, also showing at Haifa, CineLibri (Bulgaria), opening in Italy Oct. 31, 2023. Screened for this review as the opening film of the 2024 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center (May 30-June 6, 2024). Showtimes:
Thursday, May 30 at 7:00pm – Q&A with Edoardo De Angelis
Monday, June 3 at 3:15pm

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