The Long Night records record numbers: 3 and a half million viewers for the first episode of Fiction RAI directed by Giacomo Campiotti and produced by Luca Barbareschi. So everything is fine? No, absolutely no. This is yet another great, painful, missed opportunity on the part of Italian television, the one signed by RAI and which still fails to make that leap in quality necessary to offer a modern product. Television narration has profoundly changed, the bar has been raised, and seeing how that Grand Council of Fascism is described to us which among on 24 and 25 July 1943 he dropped Benito Mussolini, It’s truly mortifying.
A mountain that gave birth to a Littorio mouse
The Long Night begins by taking us three weeks before that fateful date, with which Benito Mussolini (Duccio Camerini) is cornered, ousted by his own loyalists, led by him, by the infamous Dino Grandi (Alessio Boni), President of the Chamber of Fasci. Italy has been crushed by a sequence of disastrous military defeats, the allies have landed in Sicily, the country is afflicted by poverty and a now universal dissent on the part of the Italian people towards fascism is no longer recoverable. Those hours, with that Grand Council that between 24 and 25 July 1943effectively kick-starting the regime’s collapse and setting the stage for 9/8 and what followed, was potentially an incredible source of narrative in the right productive hands. The Long Night one looks at the names of the cast, who the director is, sees a long-time producer as Barbary and he feels optimistic, or at least expects something minimally in line with modern seriality. Fiction, prehistoric wordidentifying a certain television style, from when the Lira still existed and RAI dominated sole and undisputed.
Anastasio and Mussolini: if this is the “human capital” of the right
The director of 3-I, appointed just last autumn, sends a delusional email to the board of directors quoting the Duce’s speech on the Matteotti crime. The fascist quote would be enough to justify his resignation but at the base there is also a theme of institutional ignorance and transparency
In a certain sense, it is perfectly consistent with the subject matterwith that conspiracy against the Duce which highlights its historical, political death, before the human one which will follow in two years. The Long Night makes another fundamental mistake: it immediately pushes on a theatricality of representation of the narrative process and its protagonists, which in short eats up any possibility for the public to empathize or grasp the historical sense of what the series wants to deal with. Everything is over the top, everything is stereotyped, everything is old in the way in which they try to shout rather than explain, to talk to us about that desperate and already defeated Italy, about those hierarchs who are looking for a way out as best they can. Aesthetically, photography increases the patinated and plasticized effect, the sense of total unnaturalness that besieges us in every scene, in every shot. Also here, The Long Night makes the very serious mistake of deciding that melodrama and historical narration must have the same weight or are the same thing. It’s not like this, it has never been like this, you have to choose, or rather you have to let one live through the other but with the right tact, the right clarity and delimitation, without taking digressions that lead you off track, that create secondary narrative streams nonsense. The final feeling is often that of a series of self-satisfied scenes attached to each other, without there having been any desire to seek a shred of coherence.
A living television fossil out of time
The Crown has taught us so much in recent years about how characters connect to the dietic process, to their evolution, as they did Successionbut also looking at our house The Brilliant Friend o The Good Mothers. And so it seems incredible that the final result proposed here was considered passable. But just look at the frenetic acting, all sighs, shouts, melodramatic pauses, the inability to create true intimacy and a narrative on multiple levels, to give naturalness. We are in 2023, who should receive such a product? Which excessively humanizes the worst of fascism, which indeed creates a truly disturbing moral and interpretation short circuit. You don’t need to have read Giorgio Bocca o Emilio Gentile to know that Mussolini himself, like Grandi, Ciano, Farinacci, Bottai, Scorza and the others, were not so much interested in the country, in the Italians, as in themselves, in their own survival, in their own personal gain. The same goes for House of Savoy who fled, abandoning everyone shortly thereafter, just as she had been absent for twenty years. The Long Night he revels in his belonging to a sort of hunting reserve for the -anta public. It’s a shame, because Boni gives it his all, but his Grandi as an anti-hero is frankly not very drinkable, It’s not better for the Duce of Camerini, so pumped up, so revved upso limited in its dimension of excess that it appears almost deformed, caricatured.
Everybody at home it is still the definitive film about September 8th
Luigi Comencini’s masterpiece remains unparalleled for understanding what happened 80 years ago, in the days of the armistice and the House of Savoy on the run
Too harsh a term? But why has Rai fiction never been, especially unintentionally? This series (sorry fiction) is un disheartening labyrinth of artificiality, which feeds on stock phrases and operetta mottoslook for an epic that empties like a punctured balloon. Was the Italy of the Grand Council really like this with its protagonists? It remains de The Long Night this direction however honest, a good soundtrack, but every comparison not only with The Crownbut also with what a master like Bellocchio was able to do and still can do today, it is mortifying. That date, that river meeting that decided much of our history, deserved another hand, another production, another ability to be narrative. AND Don’t blame the actors, who are actually the only ones who are not guilty, often forced into certain artistic canons for mere survival. RAI is the mirror of the country and we are a country in the image and likeness of The Long Night: ci we overestimate while we sink into mediocrity, we think we are innovative by giving space to Petacci’s Martina Stella or to Maria José’s Aurora Ruffino, the same as other women on our small screen were forty years ago. Which, ultimately, confirms that we have never really come to terms with fascism, and this is why we are unable to create a re-enactment of it that is real and tangibly free from emphasis.