The timeliness of Bellocchio’s film depicting the kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro is both tragic (for obvious reasons) and fortunate. In the politically polarized Italy of 1978, Red Brigade activists abducted the then Christian Democrat leader, but the refusal of both Moro’s own party and the Vatican to negotiate weighted by the trajectory of history doomed the Brigade’s efforts to kick-start a proletarian revolution to failure.
These dramatic events are recounted through the eyes of Chiara (Sansa), a twenty-three year old revolutionary who dreams of continuing her late father’s struggle against the fascists while clutching a well-thumbed copy of ‘Letters Of Resistance Fighters Before The Revolution’. As the horror of the seemingly inevitable execution dawns on Chiara and her comrades, Good Morning, Night probes the failure of both ideologies while stressing the heartbreaking humanity of the situation.
This fascinating portrait of a fractured society even manages to pull off occasional (and happily constrained) forays into magic realism, but it’s the weird normality of the terrorist clique’s existence which lingers, ramming home Chomsky’s disquieting observation that everybody, given the right petri-dish, could be a saint or a gas chamber attendant.
One can only hope that someone, somewhere can round up all the ghouls who downloaded Ken Bigley’s execution and compel them to watch this considered drama on a loop.