Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly

Vincere

Crit

At last, the answer to the eternal question: was the young Mussolini a hottie?

A funny thing happened on my way to not liking this: Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), whose immediate and enduring passion for Il Duce quickly becomes as tiresome as it is inexplicable, finally did to me what she could not do to the father of her child: she wore me down, she won me over, she convinced me that she was worth loving and believing in. A spectacular performance by Mezzogiorno, and, as Benito senior and, later, junior, exceptional work as well by Filippo Timi.

The film itself plays some interesting games, using the Futuristic milieu as a backdrop, and veering occasionally nearly into surrealism. Contemporary newsreel footage (which reveals, among other things, that Timi looks nothing like Mussolini) and clips from commercial films including Chaplin's The Kid are folded in effectively. And there is one shot--of Ida climbing the fence of the asylum as snow falls outside--that is as arresting as any I've seen lately.