Marco Bellocchio’s latest masterpiece details the life of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the mother of notorious womanizer Benito Mussolini’s only acknowledged illegitimate child. The couple begin their relationship in Milan in 1914; Ida owns a beauty salon and Benito is an impassioned socialist union organizer and the editor of Avanti. Only a year later, however, he marries someone else, rewrites his left-wing past and repudiates his former lover and their son. Ida, obsessed to the point of madness yet tragically aware of what she’s doing, fights to be acknowledged and as a result is forcibly interned until death. With a stunning performance  by Mezzogiorno as a woman grossly wronged, Bellocchio conceives Vincere as a grand opera gracefully employing historic newsreel footage, inventive montage techniques and an extraordinary score to give the film a surging symphonic stature.

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Written by Marco Bellocchio, Daniela Ceselli. Photographed by Daniele Ciprì. With Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Fausto Russo Alesi, Corinne Castelli (128 min).