Last night I managed to get around to seeing Le Rose nel Deserto, the latest film directed by Mario Monicelli. Monicelli’s career spans the history of Italian cinema, having made his first film back in 1934.
Monicelli directed Le Rose nel Deserto, on location in the Libyan desert in 2005, an admirable feat in itself, given the director’s age (91).
The film is well worth seeing, with good performances from a solid Italian cast including Michele Placido, and Alessandro Haber. The story is that of a medical corps, sitting out what they presume will be the closing months of the second world war. There are some pointed references to exporting democracy and culture, as we see a group of well meaning Italian medics struggling with the role of occupier. Halfway through, the film takes a savage turn as the troops are caught up with the struggle to take back Tobruk from the allies. Monicelli kills off half his cast in a searing indictment of the nazi-fascist imperial dream.
Worth seeing, but also dissapointing in a sense. It’s ground that’s been covered before – perhaps most impressively by Monicelli himself, when he directed Vittorio Gassman and Alberto Sordi in La Grande Guerra back in the 1950s. Italian war films have followed the same pattern ever since. We get portrayals of happy-co-lucky Italian troops, stationed in a pointless outpost wondering when it’s all going to end. Connections are made with the civilian population, and then, out of the blue, the savagery of war intrudes – usually brought by the Germans.
Conspicuously absent in Italian war films are Italian soldiers shooting at people, or doing anything more serious than breaking social norms by flirting with local girls.
There is, no doubt, a fair proportion of truth in this ‘Captain Corelli’ version of history – Italy’s troops did, in many cases, consider their lives more important than lofty fascist concepts like the patria and flag (this is something that to this day English speakers scoff about, but when you actually think about it, what’s more sick – the willingness to change sides in order to save your skin, or being prepared to die for a flag).
It’s also true, though, that throughout the cold war it suited everybody to paint the Italian military as harmless buffoons. It meant a blind eye could be turned on everybody’s past – from the Italian partisans who had, for the most part, been conspicuously absent prior to 1943, to the former fascists who simply returned to civil life after the war.
Send an army anywhere, though, and there is always a grislier side (not least of which, for example was the Italian’s gassing of civilian populations during their expansionist drive into Northern Africa) – something that avowed pacifists like Monicelli should not shy away from.