The Illusion

L'Abbaglio

VERDICT: Filmmaker Roberto Andò combines a wary humanism with expert storytelling to expose the anti-heroic truth about Garibaldi’s 1860 invasion of Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and unite Italy, though the comic subplots running through the film tend to be distracting and hard to digest.

For the lovers of classic Italian movies full of sweeping historical drama, stunning natural sets and perfectly cued acting, with a solid vein of light comedy thrown in for good measure, one need look no farther than The Illusion and its atmospheric recreation of Sicily before Italy was unified. With each new film director Roberto Andò (The Confessions, Long Live Freedom) shows himself more a master of his regional culture, with a particular skill in using the corrupt, illiberal past of Italian society to talk about its unsatisfying present. Headlining Toni Servillo as an aristocrat who turns his back on privilege to embrace the revolution, the film will make its international bow at Rotterdam in the Limelight sidebar.

Italy’s unification in the mid-19th century took place amid a scramble of opposing kingdoms ruled by France and Austria and passionate philosophical ideas about individual and national freedom handed down from the French revolution. It has provided the background for many famous Italian films, notably Rossellini’s Viva l’Italia! (1961), Visconti’s Senso (1954) and Il Gattopardo (1963) and the Taviani brothers’ early work in the 1970s. But rarely has the actual conquest of Sicily by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s legendary expedition of 1,000 men been filmed with as sober, historically questioning eye as in L’Abbaglio.

The film’s English title is The Illusion, which immediately pings a memory Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Grande Illusion with its gentleman officers and war-weary cynicism; it could just as well be translated as “The Blunder”. Both give a good sense of the critical revisionism with which Garibaldi’s expedition and its aftermath are viewed, as a lost opportunity, by Andò and his classy co-screenwriters Massimo Gaudioso (Io Capitano) and Ugo Chiti (Dogman). The trio also cowrote Andò’s wonderfully original previous film The Oddness (aka Strangeness), in which Toni Servillo plays Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello in the throes of a creative and existential crisis, while two amateur stage actors played by comedians Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone provide comic relief.

Featuring the same main cast as The Oddness, The Illusion once more bets on the ability of the Sicilian comic team to give the historical drama a boot up at the box office with Italian audiences whose interest in Garibaldi might be a little shaky. Although the filmmakers do a superlative job walking a tightrope between the film’s different comic and dramatic registers, the idea of casting TV stars Ficarra and Picone as two cowardly “Garibaldini” – ragtag civilians who enrolled in the revolutionary army not out of patriotism but for self-interest, and whose questionable moral trajectory is meant to be symbolic of the population as a whole – will be too obvious a cliché for many viewers.

Lent a determined charisma by stage thesp Tommaso Ragno, who couples flashing eyes with somber orders, Garibaldi makes several appearances in his iconic red shirt and sailor’s cap. But center stage in the film is held by one of his (real-life) senior commanders, Col. Orsini. Played as the soul of aristocratic dignity and honor by a silver-bearded Toni Servillo, Orsini is a Sicilian nobleman and intellectual who has chosen to desert the Bourbon army and the old order to fight for the freedom of his land with Garibaldi. With his idealistic young lieutenant (Leonardo Maltese), he presides over the recruitment of Garibaldi’s thousand men in Quarto near Genoa. The bar seems pretty low, considering he accepts an 11-year-old boy and both the cunning peasant Domenico (Salvatore Ficarra) and charming card sharp Rosario (Valentino Picone). But he tells his bewildered lieutenant these two dicey candidates could come in handy later on. (Of course they do.)

After a rough sea voyage to Sicily, the makeshift army disembarks in Marsala and engages in its first armed skirmish with the French on the beach – where Domenico and Rosario immediately desert. It’s May of 1860 and the time is ripe to bring the variegated regions of Italy together in a nation-state. But Domenico just wants to marry his childhood sweetheart, and Rosario wants to play cards. Stumbling around the countryside, they find shelter in a remote convent and make friends with the bored nuns, particularly the ambiguous young sister Assuntina (Giulia Andò). Fun and games ensue. But however cleverly balanced it is with the army fighting, this farcical strand gets to feel like a dead weight after a while, robbing the dramatic parts of whatever freshness they have.

Meanwhile Orsini, the consummate humanist, casts a cold eye on the horrors of warfare as he  thirsts for a new society that would bring social justice to the impoverished peasantry, whose ravished faces are poignantly caught by Maurizio Calvesi’s camera. Orsini’s one dream is to ride triumphantly into his native Palermo at Garibaldi’s side. Instead the leader has him take a small contingent of men into the mountain town of Corleone (later sadly famous as a Mafia stronghold – and yes, there were mafiosi even back in Garibaldi’s day and in the film. A relevant footnote: Andò was an assistant on Coppola’s The Godfather Part III). The object is to lure the pompous Bourbon commander Von Mechel (Pascal Greggory) away from the main attack on Palermo. The few battle scenes, though realistic in their chaos, are on the perfunctory side, but Andò achieves moments of true emotion in an understated execution, or a character’s unexpected death. (The decoy column is a true incident, also recounted in Leonardo Sciascia’s short story “The Silence”.)

As is typical of the film’s unconventional spirit, the Corleone story ends anti-climatically in its stunning main square, where the dramatic thread personified by Col. Orsini blends into a farcical masquerade by Ficcara and Picone, in an amusing tug-of-war between comedy and drama. Stretched to the limits, neither mood gives way,  making the scene a narrative high point in the film.

But this kind of theatrical tour de force fails to bail out the final scene, set in a gambling den twenty years after the Unification of Italy. It obviously makes a symbolic comment on the resilience of human nature and the difficulty of self-improvement, as well as the imperviousness of Italian society to change. But by then the characters have slipped away, and the story ends without fanfare.

Director: Roberto Andò
Screenwriters: Roberto Andò, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso
Producers: Angelo Barbagallo, Attilio De Razza
Cast:  Toni Servillo, Salvatore Ficarra, Valentino Picone, Leonardo Maltse, Tommaso Ragno, Giulia Andò, Giulia Lazzarini, Pascal Greggory
Cinematography: Maurizio Calvesi
Production design: Giada Calabria
Costume design: Maria Rita Barbera
Editing: Esmeralda Calabria
Music: Emanuele Bossi, Michel Braga
Sound mix: Carlo Missidenti
Production companies: Tramp Ltd., Bibi Film with RAI Cinema, Medusa Film in association with Netflix
World sales: Rai Cinema International Distribution
Venue: Barberini Cinema, Rome
In Italian, Sicilian dialect
131  minutes