'The Great Ambition': When Italy Almost Went Communist

In the last Italian parliamentary elections , in 2022, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) barely obtained 24,500 votes and zero representation. Not a single parliamentarian, the same result as marginal parties such as the Party for Creative Madness, the satirical group led by Giuseppe Cirillo -aka Oscurato-, director and star of the low-budget sex comedy Impotenti Esistenziali , in which Tinto Brass, the king of Italian eroticism, plays one of the leading roles. As in Cirillo's film, the Italian communists have been left powerless and irrelevant in Meloni's Italy. It's hard to imagine, then, what is being told in La gran ambizione , the political drama directed by Andrea Segre that became one of the unexpected hits of the past David di Donatello and Goya Awards in Bel Paese, and which, at the same time as its run at the Atlàntida Film Fest, is also coming to Spanish cinemas. In Bertolucci's Italy of the Novecento, Morricone's Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti - Giuliano Montaldo's film -, Elio Petri's Trilogy of Power, that is, in the Italy of the seventies, the PCI obtained the vote of one in three Italians and reached more than one and a half million members .

It was thanks to Enrico Berlinguer , its leader from 1972 to 1984, that the PCI became the most powerful communist party in the Western world . A man from a wealthy Sardinian family but committed to the workers' struggle from a young age, Berlinguer set out to sign the Compromesso Storico - the Great Historic Compromise -, a government alliance with the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro , to prevent a coup d'état like the one that had occurred in Salvador Allende's Chile. Berlinguer advocated a terza via - a third way - in the context of the Cold War: Italy had to avoid foreign interference, both Russian and American. A goal that led him to break with the Soviet Union and make enemies both before and after it.

From the current perspective of party-going politicking and tavern-style tweeting , The Great Ambition looks nostalgically at a generation of politicians with commitments beyond warming their seats and hijacking every television slot. A politics of ideas, dialogue, and consensus, profound beyond slogans and rooted in the ground: "It's not me you have to convince," Berlinguer argues to Giulio Andreotti—also leader of the Christian Democrats—"but all the Italian workers our party represents." But Segre also revives the ghost of a turbulent time of espionage, terrorism, and instability , a scenario of proxy conflicts subject to bloc warfare, with Henry Kissinger and British diplomacy willing to support that dreaded coup d'état as long as the Communist Party didn't come to power.

Of that explicit political cinema of the office and hemicycle - Good Morning, Night (2003), by Marco Bellocchio , and its subsequent adaptation to the series format Exterior Night (2022); We Want the Colonels (1973), by Mario Monicelli ; Il Divo (2008) and Silvio and the Others (2018), by Paolo Sorrentino - in Italy there is a great tradition, much more than in Spain of The Kingdom (2018) by Sorogoyen and The Man of a Thousand Faces (2016) , by Alberto Rodríguez . Where's that great film about Adolfo Suárez or Felipe González? Where are those political thrillers that tackle head-on the ins and outs of the Transition, the clandestine meetings, the drafting of the Constitution, or the attempted coups?

The Great Ambition opens with a man, Enrico Berlinguer ( Elio Germano in the role that earned him the Italian Goya for Best Actor), practicing subtle exercises in front of a double bed presided over by a portrait of Lenin . A declaration that, both in the film and in the man, intimacy and politics are inextricably linked. Segre accompanies Berlinguer to party meetings, factories, and trips to the USSR, but also portrays him at home, as the father of a large family, trying to reconcile his files with Sunday picnics. Germano's work in giving body to Berlinguer, shrunken and squat , nervous, with a cigar always in his hand, incisive but warm, is one of the great assets - despite the wig - of a film that, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to ideological disquisitions and office encounters, always so tedious and so ugly to film, with those wood-paneled walls and that depressing and institutional ochre color palette.

Nor does Segre's cold, purely narrative staging help, full of medium shots and reverse shots, conventional and effective, except for the moments when he allows himself to frame those bureaucratic scenarios of overwhelming uniformity and symmetry, which almost smell of stale tobacco and cold coffee, and in which Berlinguer's figure breaks through like a breath of fresh air. Segre's somewhat constrained recreations are also enlivened by the archival footage that underpins the film : images that invoke a longing for that era in which the collective, concern for others, union struggle, and pacifism were fashionable, before individualism took over as the dominant force. A moment of true civic involvement beyond the periodic visit to the polls, through association and the public forum. That moment in which collaboration prevailed over competition.

And in the center, Berlinguer, who tries to weather both foreign and friendly fire , after his decision to advocate a democratic path to socialism and move away from the Soviet single way of thinking, a moment represented in Berlinguer's visit to the USSR in February 1976, when after some children worthy of a Samojvalov painting sang The Internationale, the Italian criticized in a speech in front of Brezhnev: "we fight for a socialist society that is the highest moment in the development of all democratic conquests and that guarantees respect for all individual and collective freedoms , religious freedom, freedom of culture, of the arts and of science [...], in a pluralistic and democratic system."

In the midst of the pinprick between those who opposed the arrival of communism as if it were a devil with horns and a tail, Soviet communism, and the terrorism of the Red Brigades , Berlinguer attempts to push forward this project of consensus, as a united force against the world . His great ambition is the portrait of a good man, the portrait of a responsible political class that risked its face—and sometimes its body—on the issue and that ended, as his archive images recall, in a ruined decadence. The dream of Eurocommunism ends in the effigy of Margaret Thatcher.