I applauded with energy when the closing credits rolled on Campo di battaglia, touched and humbled by the gentleness that director and writer Gianni Amelio managed to infuse a war movie with, in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
Gianni Amelio’s Campo di battaglia, set in the final months of the First World War, begins as you would expect it – in a dark field where corpses are stacked into mounds. A soldier circles the bodies picking their pockets for trinkets and food. Then, from the stack behind his back, a harrowing hand appears. There is no sound or if the soldier whose hand it is is shouting, the bodies on top of him prevent it from being heard. It is unnerving and prepares us to expect the unexpected.
Indeed, in the very next scene, we find out that we will not be watching the Italian version of All is Quiet on the Western Front. We won’t be watching a predictable war movie either as we find ourselves on an unexpected battlefield – a military hospital. The place is bright and the staff is pristine clean. The wounded that they treat bring disorder (medical and hygienical) to a place almost as far away from horrors of war as the viewers are.
The patients are in the care of two doctors and childhood friends. Stefano (Gabriel Montesi) is pompous and boisterous and takes upon himself to be the judge and jury of the morals of the soldiers that he treats. He takes personal offence against those who inflict injuries on themselves in order to escape the fight for good. He is bloodthirsty, as long as it’s somebody else’s blood that is shed. Giulio (Alessandro Borghi) on the other hand is mild-mannered and sedate. “No one dies here,” he assures a worried patient. And he isn’t as quick to judge as his colleague.
The focus of the film reveals itself through the hand we saw at the beginning. It belongs to Tùmino (the accent of his name itself a point of conflict) – an instantly lovable Sicilian who lost one of his eyes but none of his character. Having one eye isn’t enough to save him from returning to the front, but if Giuilo can help it, a temporary loss in both eyes will.
Tùmino isn’t the first soldier he offers his ‘Angel Hand’ to but through it we find out that the frontline in Campo di battaglia is one about dignity, morals and most of all compassion. While Stefano looks down on the desperate desire of the wounded to return home, Giulio helps them achieve it as a way of making a real difference. He is ashamed of the comforts of higher class that were provided to him by the accident of birth. “I blaspheme every single day at what I see around me,” dictates one of the patients in his letter home and it is not lost on us that he isn’t only referring to the front.
A lot of Campo di battaglia develops very peacefully and this adds to how deep the story cuts. Halfway through the film, a face mask is put on one of the patients and it feels a bit too soon, a bit too pointed so close to the COVID epidemic to pull it off. But in Amelio’s hands, the appearance of the Spanish flu doesn’t look for a modern day parallel. He is focused on the story he has come to tell and his confidence pays off.
I applauded with energy when the closing credits rolled – something I don’t remember doing in a long, long time. I was touched by everything in this wonderful film including the last line delivered by Giulio’s fellow doctor to a scared child now on the ward. “I heard only girls die in this hospital,” the boy says. And the doctor looks down on him with softness and the words: “No one dies here.” So proving this film isn’t about war or morals or politics, but about something much more delicate and much more valuable – the legacy of hope.
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