Hammamet

Bettino Craxi was a fundamental man in Italian post-war history.
A politician we will remember for decades. A story to tell.
Damned or miraculous?
Capable or corrupt?
Fantastic or useless?
Puppet or puppeteer?
Meritorious or lucky?
Visionary or habitual?
Bettino Craxi is a dilemma.
For many he represents the emblem of corruption and yet for others he represents the charismatic, progressive and visionary leader capable of making Italy the fifth industrial power.
Given in hand it is so. In those years we were respected, rich and powerful.
Today we are marginal and often relegated to the role of punching bag or spot while others, at an international level, grew and improved.
But Craxi is corrupt. Craxi is a convicted felon. Craxi was a fugitive.
And as a political leader capable of garnering millions of votes, he was a bad example.
Gianni Amelio builds a film about his fugitive, or exile to tell Craxi.
A film whose title already declares itself: Hammamet.
The place of absconding, the place of the inglorious end of a man who lived in total political glory.
But even though the title warned us, Hammamet is not the film we expected.
Partly he makes it up to us, partly he doesn't.
Amelio's was a big risk, a risk that pays on the one hand but confuses on the other.
Apart from a very short initial incipit, very successful and very functional, the whole story told is lived in Hammamet.
Imagine you are a boy born in the 90s or a spectator not very attentive to political and judicial events or a foreign spectator.
Would you understand, watching the film, who was Bettino Craxi? What was the context around the man in this film? What exactly was he talking about? What was the country that was the scene of these past events ever told in the film?
No, if not very few fragments.
So the film immediately fails at the mere awareness of what was said earlier.
It is not digestible, it is difficult to follow, it is a puzzle without pieces, a chessboard without pawns.
In the same way, however, this amorphousness manages to make a film "particular", a universal film.
Craxi could be, represent any man of power fallen into disgrace. A decline told, telling the inglorious end of this man. A steep fall because it came from the tip of a pyramid, from the top floor of a very high skyscraper.
Greed, greed, pride, arrogance as the vehicle of the fall.
An unstoppable race that ends badly, like when you accelerate but the brake doesn't work.
It is a very intimate and very universal film, but very little, very little tells of Bettino Craxi and our "beloved" Italy, the one that today as then is a victim of itself, of quarrels, of justice vs. guaranty, of corruption, of friends of friends.
And so even an acclaimed corrupt man like Craxi ends up making a comeback, to arouse posthumous admiration.
A man of great talent who has made Italy great or a hardened criminal who has brought corruption to unprecedented levels?

Note of merit for Pierfrancesco Favino who has a metamorphosis not to be believed.
His Craxi is on the verge of twinning. Tone of voice, face, even the micro-movements and gestures are completely reminiscent of the real Craxi.

Monumental.