‘Campo di Battaglia (Battlefield)’ Review: A Great Alessandro Borghi Can’t Find the Cure for a Dull, Underwritten War Drama | Venice

The great historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 20^th century “the short twentieth century”, as he believed that this particular century concentrated its main chain of events, and their resolutions, in the period that went from 1914, with the start of the First World War, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. War has been a staple of this period, and very few wars in the history of mankind have been as bloody, devastating and disruptive as WWI. People fought in the trenches, in the dark, in fear, in the cold, in the mud. Not that wars can be any less than terrifying ordeals for anyone involved, but the Great War in particular is believed to have had the biggest impact on the soldiers and the people who were actively participating in it.

In this context moves Campo di Battaglia (Battlefield), Italian director Gianni Amelio’s new film, premiering in Competition at the 81^st Venice Film Festival. Amelio has always been interested in the themes of brotherly love, of morality, of ethics and, lately, he’s had a renewed interest in Italian history of the 20^th century, so it makes sense that after Hammamet and Lord of the Ants, he goes back to one of the most pivotal moments in Italian history, at the end of WWI.

The only thing is, Battlefield is not really a war movie, at all. Sure, it starts with a mass scene set in a trench: piles of bodies where occasionally a hand appears, sign of a man who’s asking to be rescued, and soldiers looking for scraps to eat or to save for when need arises. In the context of a country that, according to the powers that be, doesn’t really care about the fate of its military, the soldiers who survive the deadly battles in the trenches get taken to field hospitals to be cured and then released. This is where the heart of the film lies, and as soon as it reaches its central location, Battlefield turns into a very austere, solemn, rather overbearing affair.

The logic of a war hospital is quite simple: you get admitted, you get cured, you get released for combat again. But what if someone is permanently injured? Well, in that case, they get sent back home. The main suspicion of Giulio (Gabriel Montesi) is that many soldiers mutilate themselves in order to avoid being reenlisted. Gabriel is a doctor, but he’s always a fierce patriot. With his stiff moustache and upper lip, he acts more like a general than an actual doctor: he screams at the soldiers, he tells them off, he accuses them and warns them of the consequences of desertion attempts. His rigid and authoritarian attitude puts him constantly at odds with old friend and colleague Stefano (Alessandro Borghi), gentle and sort of angelic in his care for the patients. The conflict between the two characters is made very clear, or even too clear, by the director: it’s not just a matter of looks – Giulio looking and acting like an army chief, while Stefano, with his serious demeanor and his old-style round glasses, is obviously a man of science of the early 20^th century – it’s a matter of ideas. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when Stefano, the idealistic one, decides to help a homesick soldier, Private Tumisso, blind from one eye, to be sent home permanently by secretly operating on his other eye.

This action wouldn’t bear any consequences if it wasn’t for the intervention of Anna (Federica Rosellini), a Red Cross volunteer and an old flame of both Giulio and Stefano. With her strong character and morals, she disrupts the already precarious relationship between the two friends reporting Tumisso to the authorities. The fate of the soldier is easy to imagine: he gets publicly executed. At this point, the triangular relationship is set: three different mindsets on the ethics of war are presented, but they are written and laid out quite roughly. It almost sounds implausible that such different personalities might have ever been friends, if anything they are three planets on a collision course. Their conflict is rather artificial, because their characters and their relationships are severely underdeveloped, they’re simply not believable. In this sense, Anna is the most glaring case: she’s presented as a former med school student who had a serious clash with male personalities in her faculty, but her behavior during film suggests a sort of naivety that doesn’t really conform to her initial portrayal. Stefano and Giulio are supposed to be very good old friends, but their opposing personalities – one devoted to science, the other so thirsty of power – seem to indicate otherwise. That is why Battlefield feels so oddly lifeless if compared to the promising title, with a script that is a sequence of missed opportunities.

The whole movie feels like a monolith, distant and dull, filled with so many pointless silences, and needlessly overbearing. It moves at such a slow pace that it almost doesn’t move at all: the characters don’t evolve, they’re oddly one-dimensional, which, for a movie about war, is a major crime. Along with the lavish sets and costumes created by the art and costume departments, one of its saving graces is the superb performance given by Alessandro Borghi: his soulful Stefano is the only character that feels real, that feels truthful to his time. Borghi deftly overcomes the obstacles set by the script offering a nuanced performance not just in mannerism but in spirit as well.

The frustrating aspect of Battlefield is that, for its proposed intention to use the war scenario to describe a conflict of visions and ideals, it ends not with a bang but with a whimper, leaving a lot to be desired.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2024 Venice Film Festival where Campo di Battaglia played in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.