World War I physician drama premieres in Venice

The war is far away, but yet so close battlefield (battlefield), director Gianni Amelio’s sober study of Italian doctors treating wounded soldiers near the end of World War I. The film reduces the conflict to a chamber piece of three former medical students clashing over the moral implications of their duties, raising some interesting and entirely timely questions but never becoming a strong drama.

The story almost entirely takes place in a military hospital miles away from the front line. battlefield The sheer horror of the First World War is conveyed intermittently, revealing the profound physical and psychological damage suffered by the soldiers who were brought in on stretchers for treatment. In fact, many of them were so shocked (what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder) that they were willing to harm themselves further to avoid being sent back to the front lines, where they would surely die.

The patient was triaged and treated by two dedicated military doctors with diametrically opposed moral views. On one side is Captain Stefano (Gabriel Montesi), the son of a powerful family who sees it as his duty to help the war effort by sending soldiers back to the battlefield as quickly as possible. On the other side is Lieutenant Giulio (Alessandro Poggi), who comes from humble beginnings and is clearly more sympathetic. Without the knowledge of medical staff, he secretly aided already injured men, further injuring, blinding or amputating them to avoid redeployment.

The two doctors have been friends since medical school and a conflict is brewing between them, although it takes Stefano a long time to figure out that Giulio is the one committing treason by helping soldiers escape from the front lines. This is one of the more questionable plot points in Amelio and regular co-writer Alberto Taglio’s script: The hospital they work in isn’t very big, and there don’t seem to be many other doctors, so who else can help? The wounded soldier shirked his duty, but Giulio? Another weak point is the character of Anna (Fedelica Rossellini), a former student who works with them as a nurse and gets caught up in a moral dilemma and love triangle.

A rote script and direction undermine a more effective study of the numerous victims of World War I, some of whom figure prominently in the film’s early stages. In fact, some of the young men from Sicily and other impoverished areas of Italy were more lively and charming than the two uptight doctors, who were tight-lipped and seemed rather boring.

Amelio made some good movies in the 90s, including stolen child and la americabut his latest has a good-natured TV-movie feel. The footage feels overall flat and the tension never rises above a low boiling point, even if the dilemma the doctors face – caught between duty and humanity, between saving lives and mutilating living bodies – is certainly interesting.

It’s in the last scene battlefield When the first victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu began arriving in hospitals with severe coughs and fevers, it took on a different resonance. Soon young people were dying not from gunfire and mortar shells, but from an out-of-control disease. Doctors and nurses are starting to wear masks, and you don’t need a booster dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines to remind you of the latest outbreak.

Amelio takes advantage of the surging epidemic to bring the three protagonists together again, shifting the location to a gloomy isolation facility where Giulio is essentially sentenced to death. The closing scenes do little to improve things for him or those around him, and we all know how World War I ended: with more mass deaths due to an unstoppable flu that lasted for about two years. In the end, there was no chance of victory. battlefieldBut at least brave Julio fought a good fight.