Good Morning, Night
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning Night (Buongiorno, notte) is based on the 1978 Red Brigades kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. It is not a documentary - it is a drama; the film does not provide any political background to the kidnapping - it does not discuss the political climate of Italy at the time, it does not analyze the Red Brigades, nor does it mention any of the other key political figures of the period, or what Aldo Moro's politics were. The film focuses instead on the fictional stories of the individuals involved in the kidnapping: the female member of the group, the conflicts she and another member have with the more militant members of the group, and the portrayal of the incarcerated Aldo Moro character.
Much of the story involves hiding - the film opens in the dark as a real estate agent leads two of the group's members, pretending to be a married couple around an apartment, an apartment that they secretly wish to use for the kidnapping. The female character, who works in a library, hides her identity from her co-workers. She also hides it from her family. A bearded radical member of the group is hides in the apartment - no doubt hiding from the police. The kidnapped Moro is brought into the apartment in a crate, and then hidden in a back room.
While the kidnappers are not portrayed as raving lunatics, they are shown as contradicting themselves as well as being out of touch with reality - the kidnapper that is the most adamant about killing Moro worries about a cat getting at a bird in a cage; watching the news of the kidnapping, one of the kidnappers asks with disbelief "Why aren't they rebelling?" They are so caught up in a tiny ideological world that they did not realize how the population would react; an ideological miscalculation that Moro would have to pay for with his life. The state's role in the kidnapping is also brought up - Moro is left hanging when they refuse to negotiate and news footage is included of the time that shows the "entire political class" at a memorial for Moro, an event that his family did not attend.
Good Morning, Night is reminiscent of Pierre Falardeau's Octobre, another film that dramatized a "political kidnapping" of the era, the 1970 kidnapping of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ in Quebec. In both films, the older kidnapped man is the one that retains his dignity and humanity while the younger kidnappers, determined to carry out their misconceived plan to the end, lose theirs. Good Morning Night concludes with what could have been, and offers two endings: the darkness of what really happened and the sunny day of another possibility and an old man, alive, walking down the road with energy in his step.
The Lamp. October 2004