Allonsanfàn (Preview)
Reviewed by Deborah Young

Produced by Giuliani G. De Negri; written and directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani; cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini; edited by Roberto Perpignani; production design by Giovanni Sbarra; music by Ennio Morricone; starring Marcello Mastroianni, Lea Massari, Mimsy Farmer, Laura Betti, Claudio Cassinelli, Benjamin, Lev, Stanko Molnar, and Bruno Cirino. Region A and B Blu-ray, color, 112 min., 1974. A Radiance Films release.

It has been fifty years since the parable of political utopia Allonsanfàn appeared on European screens and just over a month, at the time of writing, that Paolo Taviani left the world of filmmaking forever at the age of ninety-two (his brother Vittorio, eighty-eight, predeceased him in 2018). From A Man for Burning co-directed with Valentino Orsini in 1962 to Paolo’s only solo direction, Leonora, Addio in 2022, their exceptionally close fraternal collaboration stretched over sixty years, leaving behind a large body of important work occupying a unique place in world political cinema.

“A pity you weren’t there, Fulvio,” says the title character at the end of the film, his eyes shining and blood caking on his temple. He is addressing the film’s antihero, a noble-born traitor to the cause of liberation, who has missed the revolution through his own inability to remain faithful to an idea, an ideal, an ideology, with all the hardship it entails. Youthful Allonsanfàn is speaking to us, the audience.

Set shortly after 1815 during the period of the Italian Restoration, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and the disbanding of loyalist groups who followed his revolutionary ideals, Allonsanfàn remains one of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s most fascinating earlier works, a story at times deliberately unfaithful to history, but nevertheless the perfect container to debate the eternal clash between subversive and reactionary elements in society and within ourselves. The striking 2K restoration and accurate English subtitles will open the 1974 film up to a new generation of viewers, who can fill the gaps in their knowledge of Italian cinema and history listening to Michael Brooke’s enlightening audio commentary, an invaluable extra on Radiance’s carefully crafted Blu-ray release.

The Tavianis’ sixth feature, Allonsanfàn—the title an Italian contraction of the opening words of “La Marseillaise,” “Allons enfants de la Patrie”)—has always been a film critic’s film that is best appreciated on close viewing and with a leap of faith that the jumpy, fragmented, idiosyncratic editing by Roberto Perpignani (who was also Bertolucci’s editor through Last Tango in Paris and knew what he was doing) is not an error but a meaningful parallel to the film’s subversive themes. Nonetheless, its premiere in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, where St. Michael Had a Rooster bowed two years earlier, created a sensation, spurring excited debate around its motley band of impractical revolutionaries hopelessly out of step with the times. This was just a few years before the Red Brigades would openly appear on the Italian scene in deadly political actions that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

And the memory was still fiercely strong of how the French left had overturned society in the strikes and barricades of May ’68, with rest of the Western world close on its heels. So, while the film was seen in some quarters as a total betrayal of the radical liberation movement, to be booed off the screen, it also had its supporters, who laid the defeat of the film’s fictional Sublime Brothers to their having simply chosen the wrong moment in history to rebel against Austria’s dominance, in an ill-fated bid to make the oppressed southern peasants rise up against the landowners, the Church, and the authorities. Das Kapital would not be written until 1867, but the Marxist Taviani brothers were clearly more interested in creating a bridge to the spirit of the present than in literal historicizing, which is what gives Allonsanfàn its continuing relevance.

At the time, many critics saw the 1974 film as the filmmakers’ veiled critique, during a post-1968 period of despair over failed political hopes, of the efforts of Italian extraparliamentary groups such as Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) and Potere Operaio (Worker Power) to rouse the working class to revolutionary fervor. As the filmmakers told Cineaste in a later interview (“We Believe in the Power of Cinema,” Cineaste, Summer 1983):

Even though our film, Allonsanfàn, is a period piece, it makes clear references to the situation in Italy today. The film is set in the 19th century, but the reactions to it were very strong…We sometimes like to set the story in a historical period in order to achieve detachment, to get away from a direct involvement with contemporary situations.

The film was conceived many years earlier as the opus that would bring the directors to international attention—a feat accomplished by their next film, Padre Padrone (1977), which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. In the main role of the disillusioned aristocrat Fulvio Imbriani, they originally thought of casting politically engaged actor Gian Maria Volonté, who had starred as the union organizer in A Man for Burning (1962). But as their inseparable producer Giuliani G. De Negri soon realized, the cost of filming a historical costume picture required bigger guns and a face recognizable at the box office. Furthermore, Marcello Mastroianni was interested in the story, after Marco Ferreri assured him that he needn’t worry about being directed by the still relatively obscure brothers from Tuscany. In the end, he is an uncanny choice for the role of the gentleman turncoat, liar, manipulator, and murderer, whose sensitive face with its matinee-idol appeal belies his weak character and appalling behavior…

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Deborah Young is a film critic based in Rome and senior critic at The Film Verdict.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3