Todo modo A group of leading Christian democrats attend a religious retreat, turning confessional practices into tools of power.

Balanced between political thriller, slightly futuristic fantasy and metaphysical meditation, Elio Petri's important film, claustrophobically staged by Dante Ferretti (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) is based on the 1974 novel by Leonardo Sciascia. Shelved immediately after its premiere (and never re-released) for the connections it makes to Italy's then recently murdered prime minister, the film has only now begun to attain proper critical attention.

The cast includes Marcello Mastroianni, Gian Maria Volontè and Michel Piccoli, while the score was written by Ennio Morricone.

Made in 1976 as this pandemonium was reaching fever pitch, Petri’s Todo modo represents perhaps the most uncompromising example of Italian political cinema. Whilst dutifully concluding with a disclaimer to any reference to reality, the film effectively presents an accurate, if grotesquely-designed and highly-expressionistic portrait of both the Christian Democrat Party in particular, and of the Italian situation more generally at the time.

Mischievously disingenuous, in typical Petri style, the disclaimer was justifiable at least to the extent that the film was an adaptation of a short novel by writer/intellectual Leonardo Sciascia. Published two years earlier, the novel was a culturally sophisticated and highly literary experimentation with the form of the murder mystery. The story is told in the first person by a painter and sometime writer of detective novels who one day, while driving in the countryside, chances upon a strange hermitage cum hotel. With no pressing engagements, he is drawn to remain at the Zafer Hermitage in order to observe the annual spiritual retreat about to be undertaken there by a large number of VIPs under the spiritual tutelage of the very ambiguous but captivating figure of a Jesuit cleric by the name of Don Gaetano. Cultured and well-read but also ominous and enigmatic, the novel’s Don Gaetano is explicitly connected with the uncannily bespectacled devil tempting St. Anthony in a 17th century painting by the Italian Mannerist painter Rutilio Manetti (1). The Loyolan spiritual exercises and the two murders that occur during the retreat are presented largely as a backdrop for the intellectual contest that develops between Don Gaetano and the unnamed first person narrator, who comes to be responsible (or not?) for the cleric’s own demise at the novel’s conclusion. Interestingly, for a murder mystery, the murders themselves are never solved and the reader is left wondering.

Petri’s filmic adaptation dispenses with the first person narrator together with all his refined intellectual musings and philosophical exchanges with the cleric. Instead, from the very beginning, the viewer is plunged into the midst of what appears to be a nation in crisis, visibly gripped by an unexplained but ever-spreading and highly contagious epidemic. In spite of the spiritual trappings – and the hollowness of the religiosity practised here is continually on show in the guise of the white, ghostly statues that seem nothing more than empty shells – the retreat for which the host of powerful prelates and politicians are gathering soon reveals its true nature as a fractious reunion of the factions of a ruling party. Don Gaetano’s ambiguous role as spiritual castigator in the novel is not only retained in the film but also magnified to the point of an apocalyptic exterminating angel, although always one with duplicitous and enigmatic motivations. Even more significantly, the role of “Presidente” only hinted at in the novel, is given so much more prominence in the film as to become, quite transparently, the figure of Aldo Moro. Moro’s role as both leader of one particular faction of the Christian Democrat Party and also as the great mediator and power-broker – the one who knew where all the bodies were buried, so to speak – takes centre-stage in the film in a stratagem that allows for both the ad nauseum factional infighting and the shameless and shameful division of the spoils of power by the party functionaries to be clearly shown.

This is clearly political filmmaking at its most committed, and Petri’s own left leanings come through clearly as the spiritual retreat cum party meeting becomes something of a satanic ritual and a descent into hell – the descent and dissolution of a ruling class, fighting to retain its privileges, but by extension that of an entire nation. Indeed, the ubiquitous and intrusive presence of closed-circuit television cameras throughout the film metonymically links the claustrophobic inside of the hermitage with the Italy outside, a country where by this time everyone is on file, everyone and everything is under continual surveillance. All to no avail, of course, since in spite of it all, the culprits were never caught and Italy remained – and remains to this day – the country of unsolved mysteries.

As a sort of anamorphic mirror held up to an entire nation, the film could hardly please and indeed it received a rather cold reception on all sides of the political fence. The film’s parodic portrayal of Moro came back to haunt it when two years later Moro was abducted in broad daylight by the Red Brigades and held for 55 days before being executed for what were deemed to be his political “sins”. The subsequent surge in public sympathy for him served, if anything else were needed, to consign Petri’s film to the dust-heap, and it was subsequently seldom screened.

In his review of Petri’s film at the time of its release, writer Alberto Moravia deplored the fact that it appeared to be motivated by nothing other than hatred for the ruling Italian political class, presenting it, as he put it, “in a grotesquely apocalyptic setting, as a clique of dead souls in bodies only provisionally still alive” (2). Moravia clearly regarded this as a questionable representation, and yet arguably he himself may have been remembering nothing less than Dante’s characterisation of some of the worst sort of political traitors in the depths of the Inferno (3). Perhaps it may be an exaggeration to equate Petri with Dante but, like Dante in the Inferno, Todo Modo does furnish us with a caustic, expressionistic socio-political portrait of Italy during some of its darkest hours. by Gino Moliterno

Endnotes
1.The painting was reproduced on the cover of the first Einaudi edition of the novel.
2.“[…] il solo sentimento che anima il film è l’odio contro il gruppo dirigente, oggi al potere in Italia, presentato, in un’aria grottescamente apocalittica, come una consorteria di anime morte in corpi provvisoriamente ancora vivi.” Now in Elio Petri: XL Mostra internazionale del cinema, Venezia 1983, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1983, p. 80. Author’s translation.
3.See the ending of Inferno, canto XXXIII (Here)

In the last period of my life I made displeasing films. They are displeasing in a society that asks for agreeableness to everything, even to commitment; if commitment is pleasant, and therefore does not annoy anyone, society will accept it, otherwise it will not. My features, on the contrary, go even past the sign of disagreeableness.
In Todo Modo there is plenty of unpleasantness and even a great pessimism. The same is true for Good News, where one almost trespasses on misanthropy. What is all this due to? Why do I make such films? Clearly it is because of a precise feeling that a point has been reached where all the conditions existing when I was a boy have vanished.
In concert with my producer and G.M. Volonté himself, I threw away the first two days’ shooting of Todo Modo since G.M. Volonté’s likeness to Aldo Moro was disgusting, embarrassing and sickening. (Here)

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A metaphysical mystery based on the novel by Leonardo Sciascia, Todo Modo is the most curious and puzzling of Petri’s films and offers a not-so-veiled criticism of the Christian Democratic political party. A group of Italy’s most successful politicians goes on a monastic retreat at the convent of Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni) to contemplate their notable careers and to secretly devise a new power structure. After a series of mysterious crimes, the consortium become divided and ultimately, depleted. The film’s unabashed leftish politics are given vivid articulation through the work of noted production designer Dante Ferretti. (Here)

Aftermath [edit]Since the middle of the 1990s until 2008, most communists and former-communists, many socialists and many former members of the DC co-operated in the coalitions "The Olive Tree" and its successor "The Union". The largest opposition party the Democratic Party considers itself continuing in the tradition of the compromise. (Here)

The Christian Democrats (DC) have proved increasingly incapable of governing Italy. The past few years have seen an endless succession of collapsing cabinets; in the face of waves of strikes and political violence, the DC has been unable to enact badly needed social reforms. The lira has fallen drastically and economic growth has come to a standstill. DC rule has been marked by widespread corruption and scandal. The recent charge that party leaders accepted payoffs from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation is a stellar example. Furthermore, their conservative position on social issues has become increasingly unpopular with the electorate, sixty percent of which defied the DC and the Vatican and supported divorce in a referendum held last year.

But the Communist ascendancy is not merely a product of Christian Democratic weakness. The PCI now participates in five regional governments and in the municipal governments of all the major cities north of Rome. There it has been able to provide effective and honest public administration, in sharp contrast to the DC's dismal record. More importantly, the PCI stands for an "Italian road to socialism" sharply distinct from the Soviet model.

The independence of the PCI has been evident for some time. It was graphically demonstrated by the recent confrontation between its leader Enrico Berlinguer and Brezhnev in Moscow. The PCI has been strongly committed to democratic institutions and civil liberties for over thirty years; it favors keeping Italy in NATO and has renounced the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, even though the general elections may well produce a Communist--Socialist majority, the PCI does not want to form a government exclusively of the left, fearing that drastic polarization would result, as it did, for example, in Chile. It prefers the "historic compromise," a Communist--Christian Democratic coalition which would provide a broad popular base for the much--needed transformation of Italian society.

Kissinger has repeatedly warned that the presence of Communists in NATO--member governments is unacceptable. The threat of American intervention, whether diplomatic, economic, or military, is the most serious obstacle to the potential success of the historic compromise. In the face of militant American disapproval and sanctions, menanced by CIA infiltration and influence, Italians understandably fear that their country may become another Chile. Their fears are well supported by the American press, judging from a recent Newsweek cover. America already considers Italy another Vietnam.

The PCI had wanted the general elections to be held after the 1976 American presidential elections to prevent the Italian situation from becoming a campaign issue here. Hence the decision of the DC to hold the elections in June appears to be designed to intimidate the Italian electorate with the specter of possible American intervention in the event of a PCI victory.

Kissinger's intense opposition to PCI governmental participation is both shortsighted in terms of American interests and out of touch with the needs of the Italian people. The PCI's rise is the product of long term changes in Italian society, economics, and politics which are unlikely to be reversed. American interference is unlikely to prevent a PCI victory; it will only antagonize the electorate. Furthermore, the historic compromise is the single development most likely to stabilize Italian politics; it is also the only force capable of regenerating Italy's stagnating economy.

Nor would a PCI triumph represent an extension of Soviet domination into Western Europe; in fact, by legitimating diversity within European Communism, it would increase the ability of Eastern European countries to explore alternative socialist models to that of the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, continued American intransigence will only weaken the PCI's ability to maintain its distance from Moscow by undermining its contention that there is a "third way" between East and West. American policy makers should abandon their cold war vision of a monolithic international Communist movement, and resolutely refrain from interfering with Italian moves toward the historic compromise. (Here)