The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio, 2019) (Patreon)

I don't know Bellocchio's work as well as I should, having seen only four of his films to date. However, the other three films of his I've seen -- My Mother's Smile, Good Morning, Night, and Vincere -- all exhibited varying shades of bravado. Bold, often declarative acting, sweeping camera movements, and the occasional, well-detonated shock cut: all of these elements gave the impression of a filmmaker who came of age in the heady, Brechtian 60s but was also uniquely invested in "local" Italian matters, such as Catholicism and the tradition of grand opera. Bertolucci is his only obvious peer in this regard, but Bellocchio seems less of a Freudian than the maker of The Conformist. (It'd be hard not to be.)

Compared to those earlier works, The Traitor exhibits what I'm tempted to call "expressionist restraint." That operatic aspect evinced by Bellocchio in, say, the highly theatricalized murder of Aldo Moro in Good Morning, Night is just bubbling beneath the surface in The Traitor, but the film is largely held together by a veneer of classical realism. So particular elements, such as an on-screen body-count ticker, or an Eisenstein-derived intercut between a mob boss (Nicola Calì) and a pacing hyena in a cage, are striking because they introduce some texture to an otherwise smooth surface.

In fact, there is such a burnished, cinema brun look to The Traitor that I suspect Bellocchio is not so much adapting classical methods as operating within a particular representational schema. This is a period piece about the cosa nostra, and it has the Old World heft and polish of "mob films," particularly those by Coppola and Scorsese. So The Traitor is, in a way, commenting on the way we have come to understand the Mafia, an entity which, as we are told, does not really exist.

A biopic of sorts, The Traitor is about Tomasso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), a Sicilian mob soldier who, after one double-cross too many, decided to cooperate with anti-corruption judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi) to bring his former associates to justice. This resulted in the first "Maxi Trial" in 1986, wherein dozens of cosa nostra members were simultaneously arraigned and tried. (Falcone, who was assassinated in 1992, is also one of the animating spirits in Franco Maresco's film The Mafia Is Not What It Used to Be.)

Although Buscetta is predictably branded as a snitch, Bellocchio is certain to allow the man to make his case for why he turned State's evidence. To hear Buscetta tell it, the cosa nostra had abandoned its principles, both on a local level -- flouting a long-standing code not to kill Mafia Men's family members, or innocent bystanders generally -- and more globally, by joining the drug trade and "selling death" to the nation's young people, including Buscetta's own son, a heroin addict.

Although it is crucial to respect the historical specificity of this story and the culture around it, I nevertheless find myself wondering why Bellocchio found it necessary to explore this material now. And it seems that the question of institutions that have abandoned their principles is an evergreen one. Whether it's the Catholic Church or various political parties (including both parties in the U.S.), one finds that respect and allegiance are expected, if not compelled, even when nothing is left but a self-perpetuating shell. 

Put another way: one person's rat is another person's whistleblower.