‘Battleground’ Review: War Is Hell In Gianni Amelio’s Atmospheric But Dramatically Underpowered WW1 Drama – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comThe battleground in veteran Italian director Gianni Amelio’s atmospheric feature is nominally Europe in the last furlong of the 1914-18 conflict, but the real subject is the war that the Italian government declared on its own people.
There are aspects of this all-too-true story, based loosely on Carlo Patriarca’s 2020 novel The Challenge, that will resonate throughout the world, and one might think that post-Vietnam America would be especially receptive to a story about the callous deployment of young, blue-collar men into savage conflicts from which they will almost certainly never return.
Amelio’s film, however, while perfect for the local market, isn’t exactly likely to cross over. The director sets the scene with grim images of bodies piled higher and higher in bleak muddy trenches.
The year is 1918, and the armistice is just around the corner, but no one on the front line can possibly know that yet. Soldiers pass through the corpses, and though we give them the benefit of the doubt (are they looking for signs of life?), it soon transpires that these men are just opportunistic thieves, relieving the dead of their wallets and greedily snaffling the stale crusts they find in their pockets.
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