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‘M. Son Of The Century’ Review: Joe Wright’s Mussolini Series Brilliantly Depicts How Banal Evil Gets Its Way- Venice Film Festival

By Stephanie Bunbury,

5 hours ago

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It was Adolf Hitler’s name that became synonymous with evil, but his Italian counterpart — Benito Mussolini, named for a Mexican revolutionary leader by his staunchly Socialist father — was arguably the more enduring brand. Any populist politician today owes a good deal to the Mussolini playbook, brought to explosive life in an extraordinary Italian-language series by British director Joe Wright.

M. Son of the Century sticks to the facts of the great dictator’s life, which are extraordinary enough, but stretches those facts into surreal shapes until we feel we’re in some parallel historical universe. Wright’s brassy style — unlike anything he has done before — owes something to Fellini, but a whole lot more to its subject. Because Benito Mussolini, apart from anything else, definitely knew how to put on a show.

He would have approved, for example, of the way the series starts. Graphic contemporary news footage shows Mussolini’s ignominious end, when his abused corpse was publicly flayed by anyone who wanted to take a whack at it. Meanwhile, Luca Marinelli gives us his voice from beyond the grave — a voice we will grow to know very well, in all its registers — as it reminds us that it wasn’t long ago that everyone loved him.

It is only then that we return to the beginnings of Mussolini’s career, as a political outsider surrounded by criminals and psychopaths for whom this proto-movement was just an excuse to beat heads. We won’t be getting the whole story; in fact, we only see 10 years play out over eight hours, culminating in the murder of a socialist politician that was correctly blamed on Mussolini and nearly finished his career. Of course, it didn’t. In the last episode, he pulls back from oblivion. As we know all too well, he will soon have a glorious war on his hands.

As Mussolini, Marinelli appropriately dominates the small screen with a performance that is the Futurist aesthetic made flesh: dynamic, kinetic, forceful and utterly riveting. Like the series itself, he brings a deep, questing intelligence to his interpretation of a tyrant whose grip on his subjects often seems, from this distance, inexplicable. A preening bully, Benito Mussolini strikes an absurd figure in old newsreels, thumping his fist in the air, his chin and chest both puffed out; Winston Churchill dubbed him “the bullfrog of the Pontine marshes.”

What M. Son of the Century so brilliantly conveys is how well this froggy son of a blacksmith made that pomposity work for him. Having opposed elections — along with with everything else — in his early days, he came to see the “putrid liberal democracy” as his road to power. He would stand as prime minister, knowing he would win. “I’m like an animal,” he often says. “I can smell the time ahead — and it is my time.” Simple ideas and a strong man, he adds: That’s all people want. Once they had voted for him, they need never vote again.

There is a political strategy that is having a moment right now. M. Son of the Century always seems up to the minute, in fact, despite being meticulously attuned to the attitudes, vocabulary and visual details of its time. There is the odd arch in-joke — “Make Italy great again!” snickers Marinelli direct to camera — but it is his cynical lack of belief in anything but his own entitlement to power that feels eerily familiar.

What the series brings home is the extent to which Benito Mussolini, having no ideals of his own, could be many things to many men. If it will pay him to kneel to the king he despises, he will do it. He will offer the Pope a sop — tax breaks, the oldest bribe in the book — while his goons murder a priest who raises his voice against the Blackshirts. He is all for the striking farm workers until the bourgeois landowners offer to finance his bankrupt newspaper; the goons are duly despatched to kill, maim or torture every honest son of the soil they can string up in the hay barn.

And yet, he is never quite a monster. Marinelli’s marvelously mobile face registers his character’s uncertainties, his ecstasies, his weaknesses — the greatest of which is his monumental vanity. There is a wonderful scene where his mistress Margherita (Barbara Chichiarelli), a rich Jewish socialite with a perverse lust for chaos, presents him with a parting gift: a vast bust, the head like a boulder, of Mussolini himself. Enraptured by his own graven image, he doesn’t even hear her say she’s leaving him.

It is not all about shifting moods, however; there is a good deal of violence here, cut for speed and vigor, given sickening life by the tip and tilt of the camera and propelled by booming drums and electronica at a viscerally stirring 120 BPM. These club-mix massacres evoke both the horror and sheer excitement of fascism; it’s politics for sadists and thrill-seekers. At that point we understand, with our guts as well as our minds, how this kind of banal evil gets its way. Forewarned is forearmed.

Title: M. Son of the Century
Festival: Venice (Series, Out of Competition)
Director: Joe Wright
Screenwriters: Stefano Bises, Davide Serino
Cast: Luca Marinelli, Francesco Russo, Barbara Chichiarelli, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Benedetta Cimatti, Gaetano Bruno, Maurizio Lombardi, Vincenzo Nemolato, Paolo Pierobon
Network: Sky Atlantic
Episodes: 8

‘M. Son Of The Century’ Review: Joe Wright’s Mussolini Series Brilliantly Depicts How Banal Evil Gets Its Way- Venice Film Festival

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