A river runs by the village where I live in Italy. It’s impressive when it’s in full flood and during WW1 was the northeastern frontline where Allied troops faced off against the might of the Austro-Hungarian army. In Italian, the river was originally known as “La Piave,” taking the feminine gender, but Gabrielle d’Annunzio, Italy’s most famous poet, aviator, lover and intellectual, claimed that a feature so vital can’t be merely feminine and changed it to “Il Piave.”
Regendering a river like this is not what most people have in mind when they talk about gender fluidity and despite some progressive ideas about sexual and religious freedom, D’Annunzio was first and foremost a military adventurist and cocaine-addled egomaniac whose theatrics would cost a significant number of lives and lay the groundwork for his most ardent follower, Benito Mussolini, to follow in his formation of the Italian fascist movement.
The beginning of D’Annunzio’s most famous intervention on the world stage came on September 12, 1919, when – disgruntled by the “mutilated peace” of WW1 – he and a band of Italian soldiers occupied the Croatian city of Fiume/Rijeka. Writer and director Igor Bezinović (A Brief Excursion) is a Croatian and a native of what the Croatians and the world now call Rijeka. His film not only tells the story of D’Annunzio’s illegal incursion and 16 month occupation, it also serves as a rebuttal to Italian narratives which still celebrate D’Annunzio as both a literary giant – he is a dominant, immovable figure on school curriculums – and as a political inspiration. In the easternmost Italian city of Trieste, the umpteenth statue celebrating him was unveiled. Anyone doubting the resurgence of Italian fascism under the government of Georgia Meloni, (whose party is also historically rooted in fascism), only need read the comments underneath the trailer of this film on YouTube.
The genius of Bezinović’s film is that it manages to portray the utter absurdity of D’Annunzio while never losing touch with the deadly seriousness of the consequences which his actions had both in Rijeka and the rest of the world. He also identifies the core anti-human values of fascism, which viewed mankind and the world as fundamentally rotten and irredeemable and valued death and violence as cleansing. D’Annunzio’s motto for his troops “Morto sì! Vivo no!” (Dead yes! Alive never!), says it all. Nor does it lose sight of the complexity of the moment as leading industrialists such as Giuglelmo Marconi hastened to Fiume to support and exploit the occupation.
Against this confluence of cynicism and pessimism, Bezinović recruits ordinary people from the streets to participate in his reconstructions of old photographs and films and shows how weirdly similar some of the faces are, but how their humour and their values are completely opposed to fascism. A series of young men are asked if they’d like to be soldiers. None of them would, with the exception of a musician who thinks there might be some anarchy to be had in the army. An old lady stops a young man dressed in the regalia of one of D’Annunzio’s legionnaires and berates him about how he should be in a disco dancing with girls. “Those boots don’t suit you“, he’s told.
The non-actors who play D’Annunzio are men cast largely because they’re the right age and bald. They speak Fiumano, a dialect of Italian spoken by a minority of Rijeka, and they get into the spirit of it, though at times they can’t help but burst out laughing at the preposterousness of what they’re doing. They might not be good at this dictator business but that’s a good thing. Better corpsing than corpses.
And as the film goes on and D’Annunzio’s occupation becomes a reign of terror, it’s genuinely chilling to see the parading and the japes turn into violent repression and the smashing of Croat businesses. The farce and the tragedy are intertwined. D’Annunzio reintroduces the Roman salute into the modern political world – and seeing that throwing-your-heart-to-the-crowd gesture makes the film feel far more contemporary than is comfortable. Bezinović and his collaborators – many ordinary citizens of Rijeka – use history, facts, humour, community and imagination against the dangerous clownery of D’Annunzio and his mythmakers, and his modern equivalents.
A woman in the street remarks that “the fascists are still here, they just know how to hide themselves better these days.” What makes Bezinović’s film not only fascinating but necessary (indeed vital) is that the fascists don’t feel like they need to hide anymore.
Fiume o Morte just premiered at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam.