THE D’ANNUNZIO OF THE BRILLIANT BEZINOVIĆ

by ANDREA PICCO

A good dose of irony and a satirical gaze were needed to demolish in an hour and a half all the fascist rhetoric, on which the right wing still feeds today, in government of cities, regions and the entire country. Igor Bezinovič, Croatian director from Rijeka and author of “Rijeka or Death!”, uses cinema and metacinema – that is, cinema that speaks of itself, revealing the mechanisms behind making cinema – to return the Vate, D’Annunzio’s rhetorical and propagandistic construction hero in the elusive “Rijeka enterprise”, to his real dimension, that is, those of an exalted cocaine addict who also happened to know how to write. In doing so, he inevitably ridicules a way of doing things: the creation of the right-wing myth of the Superman, of the “conquistador“, whether they are lands or women does not matter. Bezinovič starts with a question: what remains of D’Annunzio today in Rijeka? What do the people of Rijeka know about what happened just over a hundred years ago? The film therefore starts as a documentary, with the citizens of Rijeka often answering that they have no idea who the guy is after whom a school, or a street, or a building in the city is named. Someone knows that yes, he was a fascist. However, the interviews are also the pretext to approach people and ask them to help him for his real goal: Bezinovič is looking for actors to put D’Annunzio and his “enterprise” back in front of a camera, as metaphorically it was done to create his myth. So to interpret the Vate he hunts for fellow citizens whose only essential characteristic is to be scarsocrinite. From here on, documentary and fiction, cinema and metacinema intertwine, thanks also to a narrative voice in Rijeka dialect that gradually tells how things actually went a hundred years ago, that is, how D’Annunzio was seen by the Rijeka people of the time. Using photos and images shot during the two years of the poet’s “Reign” – D’Annunzio had over ten thousand photographs taken during his stay in Rijeka, just to say how to build a hero – the feat of Fiume is retraced from the departure in Venice by car, passing through the stop in Ronchi – which would become the Legionaries in that period – for the night, until he arrived at the gates of Fiume at the head of a convoy of trucks of soldiers and the clash with the Italian army that blocked his way, refused to stop and arrived in the city. Except that, if the costumes are of the time, this is not the case for the Vate’s car, a flaming red convertible, for the soldiers’ trucks, for which real hauliers have been hired with their current vehicles, for the various D’Annunzio who follow one another, with a distinctly Slavic accent. The one who says no to the halt of the Royal Army, for example, is a D’Annunzio who in life is the singer of a rock band. From the first floor where he is seen in the role of the Vate, a backward tracking shot reveals the set and on the left there is his band ready to welcome the “handful of heroes” complete with drums and electric guitar. All these jumps from one plane to another, from fiction to fiction of fiction, skilfully orchestrated by Anton Spazzapan who took care of the scenography, do nothing but put the Italian rhetoric on D’Annunzio under the lens of ridicule, revealing the original “fiction” staged to create the image of a hero. Mussolini will soon learn the great value of the image, the cult of the character that D’Annunzio had created for himself in the years in which fascism was born. Rhetoric that has come down to this day, intact, if statues are dedicated to the poet, in Trieste for example, or his feat is commemorated every year, in Ronchi dei Legionari. The film buries her with a laugh, or rather with a smile, that of someone who has understood the trick and overturns it, to make the house of cards fall. After all, the telling of the story can bend to one’s will, it can be built to one’s liking, just like the set of a film: you choose the shot you want the viewer to see, cutting the rest. That will be the only point of view that the viewer will see and on that he will build his opinion. Here, using metacinema, Bezinovič shows us that it is all fake, and that the heroes are artfully constructed. Just disassemble them, and you’re done. It is therefore not surprising that “River or Death!” won the Tiger award and the FIPRESCI prize at the 54th Rotterdam Film Festival on 2 February. It must be seen, absolutely, because it is brilliant.