Swimming against the current of decades of anti-war films that have underlined the horrors of world war — one of the most recent and terrifying being this year’s Oscar candidate from Germany, All Quiet on the Western Front — Italian director Edoardo De Angelis (Indivisible, The Vice of Hope) strikes out in a very different direction in Comandante, the opening night film in Venice and his first to make competition.
The time is 1940 and the film’s hero (drawn from real life) is an eccentric submarine commander who is enthusiastically engaged in sinking Allied ships and shooting down British planes because Italy is “at war”. But above all he is a “man of the sea” and a civilized Italian, so when faced with a rowboat full of drowning Belgians who survived his attack on their vessel, he lets himself be guided by a fixed moral principle: a defenseless man is not an enemy, and it is one thing to wage war and another to rescue a man in need.
In another intense and convincing performance, Pierfrancesco Favino (it is hard to imagine another actor in the role) gives Commander Salvatore Todaro a stern demeanor but a heart of pure gold, with an unexpected touch of visionary mysticism that allows him to predict story developments in advance. A seaplane crash has left him with a damaged spine so painful it can only be treated with morphine (which he heroically refuses). The visual sign of this is a complicated corset made of adjustable straps, a device he wears for most of the film and a constant reminder of his moral backbone, strong will and ability to remain alive.
The early scenes in Sandro Veronesi and De Angelis’s screenplay take place at night, in a dark parting of the crew from the land. The Comandante marches his officers and his men through the deserted port of La Spezia and onto the huge submarine they will fight in. He harangues then with more practical advice than patriotic speeches, though the word Fascism is used. Suddenly he pulls a young electrician out of the ranks and informs him he’s not coming with them. Later, aboard the sub, he gets a message that the youth had to be hospitalized a few days later and would have died had he sailed. This is but one of Todaro’s feats of intuition, as well as an attestation to his humanity and concern for his men.
Naturally they all adore him. His second-in-command Vittorio (Massimiliano Rossi), a weathered old sea dog who has visible screws sticking out of the side of his face, is a close friend and warns him they will never get through the Straits of Gibraltar to carry out their mission in the Atlantic. This sets up the film’s most exciting scene, when the sub gets entangled in British mine cables in the Straits and a young coral diver leaves the sub to free it with a pair of wire cutters. It achieves that touch of poetry that other scenes only reach for, before falling into sentimentality.
In one of the latter, a young gunner whose leg has just been shot off opts to stay on deck and die watching the battle, while the shaman-like Todaro presses a hand over his forehead. Their willingness to embrace death is very far from the passive submission of the unheroic conscripts who populate the ranks of today’s anti-war films. Comandante is closer in feeling and style to military movies like Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 Das Boot, which was also based on real experiences aboard a German submarine in WWII during the Battle of the Atlantic.
Das Boot is modern in underlining the tedium of waiting for something to happen during a war, while aboard the Italian sub there seems to be an emergency every minute. But what really distinguishes Comandante from the anti-rhetorical school of filmmaking is its dogged insistence that Italians are more civilized than everyone else, dragging a long chain of national stereotypes in its wake. One of the most memorable characters is the chubby Neapolitan cook Gigino, whose unprepossessing appearance belies an encyclopedic knowledge of recipes from every corner of the country – and he is ready to rattle them off. This is such an amusing trick that he continues listing mouth-watering dishes over the end credits, in place of a closing song. Food also triggers the film’s one comic scene, which disconcertingly comes out of the blue, when the Belgian survivors introduce the Italians to a dish they never heard of: French fries.
For the Commander, Italian superiority derives not just from its regional cuisines but from its millennial civilization and its wealth of dialects and traditions, even going so far as to call Italy a melting pot of people of different origins. This sounds like a pipe dream, considering that Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws date from 1938 and openly antisemitic propaganda was on the rise along with Italy’s increasingly closer ties to Germany. But Todaro draws a fat black line between the two Axis countries when he tells his men that the Nazi fleet attacks in packs; the Italians do their job solo “and neither the King nor Mussolini will be with you” during the battle. And his decision to defy Fascist rules, whatever the personal costs, distinguishes his own moral valor.
As one might guess, this is an exclusively male crew and apart from a few glimpses of Todaro’s loving, sexually playful wife Rina (Silvia D’Amico), who he writes to constantly, the only female characters are a trio of heartbroken, windswept ladies staring after the young men marching off to war aboard the “iron coffin”, knowing they are likely to be killed. Composer Robert Del Naja inserts several haunting women’s choruses that underline this emotional female component. End credits inform that out of 119 submarines in the Italian navy at the start of the war, only 19 were left at the end.
Director: Edoardo De Angelis
Screenplay: Sandro Veronesi, Edoardo De Angelis
Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Massimiliano Rossi, Johan Heldenbergh, Silvia D’Amico, Arturo Muselli, Giuseppe Brunetti, Gianluca Di Gennaro, Johannes Wirix, Pietro Angelini, Mario Russo, Cecilia Bertozzi, Paolo BonacelliProducers: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Carlotta Calori, Viola Prestieri, Pierpaolo Verga, Edoardo De Angelis, Paolo Del Brocco, Attilio De Razza, Mariagiovanna De Angelis, Antonio Miyakawa
Cinematography: Ferran Paredes Rubio
Editing: Lorenzo Peluso
Production design: Carmine Guarino
Costume design: Massimo Cantini Parrini
Music: Robert Del Naja
Sound: Valentino Gianni
Production companies: Indigo Film, O’Groove in association with Rai Cinema, Tramp LTD, V-Groove, Wise Pictures
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian, Flemish, English, French, Venetian and Neapolitan dialect
120 minutes
