Monsters on both sides of the lane "Monster on the front page" Marco Bellocchio is a two-dimensional film. On the one hand, filmed in 1972, it intersects with the tradition of the Jallo that was formed at that time: how about the rape and murder of a girl, the beginning for Argento and Fulci. On the other hand, it is obvious that Bellocchio was influenced by the famous script of Durrenmat and the filmed on it in the 50s of the German film “It happened in broad daylight”. The plot of Durrenmat is familiar to many, probably from the later films In the Cold Light of the Day and The Promise with Nicholson. In Durrenmat, an uncomfortable and helpless person is accused of murdering the girl, and only a single police officer seeks to find the real criminal. Bellocchio dissects the social background of events, reconstructs the system of power behind the false accusation. After all, he is from the same group of directors as Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, Bertolucci, those who did not want to shoot the “Italian comedy of morals”, according to the vivid expression of Liliana Cavani, who, of course, labeled the Olympians of national cinema: Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti and the lesser known De Sicou and Bologni.
Bellocchio is essentially a satire of the “Christian Democrats,” the party that took on the mission in Germany and Italy to break the deadlock after the fall of fascist regimes. The Democrats had to confront the Reds, who were eager to replace the Browns. In Bellocchio, like Cavani in the Cannibals, Bertolucci in The Double, it was this confrontation that became the subject of analysis. And it was also said, as in the Cannibals and the Double, the memory of the defeat of the “revolution” of the 68th year. Bellocchio’s “Christian Democrats” are not at all happy to use the death of a girl in order to slander their political opponent, to make the “red” monster, a “cannibal,” according to Cavani’s metaphor. The sharp and distinctly cold cynical tycoon behind the “democratic” politicians is shown, it is from him that the impulse that became the title of the film emanates. Of course, neither with the Macabrian modernization of Antigone in Cannibals, nor with Bertolucci’s brilliant ultra-avant-garde Double (based on de Dostoevsky’s motives), the film The Beast on the Front Page! can not be compared. But there is one feature that later became the subject of Cavani's aspirations in The Berlin Novel and Francis. This is a kind of documentary film, its construction as a candid chronicle of real events, close to reports, or as a thorough, realistic, even naturalistic reproduction of the alleged incidents. And I must say that in this way Bellocchio surpasses the more prone to allegories, allegories of Cavani and Bertolucci.
But the spirit of '68 flew away. In The Devil in the Raft, Bellocchio illuminated day after day the underbelly of the life of communist terrorists, far from their ideological demands and full of a completely different, non-class struggle - the primitive struggle for a female. And in Hello Night, he reconstructed in detail the grim story of the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Mori, who wanted to reconcile the “Christian democrat” with social democracy. One could say of Bellocchio and his pseudo-documentary narratives, “His glass is not big, but he drinks out of his glass.”
7 out of 10