Pernicious idealism This film by Mauro Bolognini is based on real events that took place in Italy at the beginning of the last century. At that time, a lot of noise made the trial of Tullio Murri, who stabbed the husband of his sister, with whom he was associated not only with his brother and sister. However, the husband was a complacent tyrant, and divorce in those days was not possible. The problem, however, was that all members of the Murri family were liberal freethinkers: the family's father, Professor Augusto Murri, was a well-known doctor, university lecturer and atheist. Tullio Murri was a lawyer and socialist who ran for election, and Linda Murri held a free-spirited view of love and marriage. So the authorities used the process to ruthlessly crush all dissenting family members and their friends. Even those innocent of the crime received prison terms ranging from seven to seventeen years.
In the first half of the film, Bolognini shows in detail how conflict is brewing in the family of Tullio's sister, how the co-existence of the spouses becomes unbearable, how in Tullio there is a burning hatred for her husband and how the murder is planned. Tullio is not a killer in the soul, so he first simply asks a doctor he knows to prepare poison and persuades a friend to go with him for moral support. In the apartment of the victim, Tullio has a fever, he does not know how to make the victim take the poison, so he decides to simply go on a murder without any prefaces and in a frenzy to inflict 11 stabs on his son-in-law. The work of Giancarlo Giannini in this film is one of the best works of the actor.
In the second half of the film, a ruthless and dispassionate investigator with the pedanticity of a gear of some huge clockwork grinds down the entire Murri family with all his entourage. The investigator draws up a list of victims in advance and, as the guilty and practically innocent are arrested, crosses out the names with bloodthirsty voluptuousness. The only thing he fails to arrest is an old professor who has been proud all his life of raising his son and daughter based only on moral principles and ignoring religious tenets. When Fernando Rey’s hero learns that his son is a murderer, his ideal world collapses overnight and, driven by good intentions, he informs the investigator that his son committed the murder in self-defense and urges him to surrender. However, the idealism of his father was a fatal mistake, because the ruthless state machine without the slightest hesitation crushed the whole family.
This superbly staged and brilliantly played film, in which even the cold Catherine Deneuve does not lose in pair with the emotional, splashing out in his game, as if he should die tomorrow, Giancarlo Giannini, is among the best works of a wonderful director. The beautiful music of Ennio Morricone, as always in the films of Bologna, exists as a separate piece of music.
8 out of 10