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The Traitor
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Co-author: Carles Matamoros
The mechanism is as follows: two
authors exchange letters via email, for two weeks, on The Traitor; their correspondence is published according to rules established
at the outset. The game is quite simple: the opening participant proposes a
title, a screenshot and a short text, which results in a response from the
other author who, in turn, proposes a second title, a second screenshot and a
second short text addressed to the first participant. The exchange continues
with several more moves by both authors, Adrian Martin (AM) and Carles
Matamoros (CM), who aim to share and convey their passion for this film by the
great Italian director.
The portrait of a criminal family,
a criminal network: 30 people in one frame, over-illuminated and then plunged
into eerie, funereal darkness by a flash bulb. Over and over: people frozen,
identified (their names printed on the screen), numbered as a collateral corpse
at the moment of their death. The complex opening sequence of Marco Bellocchio’s The
Traitor lays out some of the film’s central motifs: an unstoppable
seriality (in an image and across time) that absorbs and destroys everyone; the
frozen pose that, in his cinema, always signifies death in contradistinction to
the life-giving moment of joyous, Dionysiac dance. With a crucial difference,
here: whenever Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino) moves (from room to room,
house to house, nation to nation), it is not in a sweep of pleasure, but a
restless, neurotic, haunted deferment of the preordained, gridded pattern of
his brutal Mafia life. The central question of the story: can Tommaso ever
escape that grid – and how?
1b. The Hands (CM)
The hands of Pippo Calò (Fabrizio Ferracane) on
Tommaso’s back in the family photograph: they already foreshadow the unbearable
burden that Bellocchio’s tragic hero will carry after his Brazilian exile. Tommaso
will never be able to escape from this initial imprint because their bond will
be sealed with an affectionate hug under the fireworks of Santa Rosalia: Tommaso
entrusts Pippo with the life of his two eldest children, Benedetto Buscetta
(Gabriele Cicirello) and Antonio Buscetta (Paride Cicirello), also located in a
central spot of the composition. But who then will be the traitor in this story? The father (Tommaso) who abandons his
offspring in Italy and then betrays those who annihilate his colleagues and
family to justice? Or the apparent friend (Pippo), who murders Benedetto
literally with his own hands?
Bellocchio’s rectangular frame is reformulated in a panoptic form in the
video surveillance room belonging to the prison where the Mafia members
betrayed by Tommaso are locked in. Multiple screens that individualise singular
personalities and, at the same time, in the same frame, in a single image of images, gather various members
of the earlier criminal family portrait. Pippo, of course, is again located in
the centre, and we have two perspectives on it: the close-up of his face
(above) and the overhead shot of his cell (below). Among the different screens
that transmit live what is going on
inside the prison, three stand out: they are broadcasting an external event, the
State funeral of Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), the key lawyer in the
State’s Maxi Trial brought against the Cosa Nostra. This media event is closely
linked to the criminals trapped in the same shot, thus exemplifying two of the
dialectical resources with which The
Traitor works: the occasional integration of archival images that punctuate
the fictional events; and the proliferation of scenes in which the characters
follow on TV the news that impact their lives (there are even TV sets in the
cells of the imprisoned Mafiosi!). The fabrication of a political tale in Italy as elaborated by the mass media – in
response to which Bellocchio offers, in several of his historical films,
alternative re-presentations of
famous people – is more evident in the following shot of another control room:
the television studio where Tommaso is interviewed.
2b. The Dreams (AM)
The dreams that
punctuate the film – an essential element of Bellocchio’s method since the mid
1980s – are a crucial variation on the surveillance and media screens. As
externalised images, dream-visions of various sorts (memories, reveries,
hallucinations), they belong to the realm of the imaginary, and this imaginary is always collective and social,
never merely individual. Even the openly metaphorical, Eisensteinian inserts of
a tiger (prowling inside its cage) and of rats (“deserting a sinking ship”, as
the saying goes) have an oneiric force. Trying to sleep on the plane, Tommaso
sees his now dead sons spectrally passing along the aisle and out through the
back curtain: a banal invisibility that, nonetheless, sparks a Shakespearean
level of guilt in him. Later, an even more terrifying apparition worthy of a giallo – as Tommaso lies down in his
relatively comfortable and secure but still soulless holding pen – shows his
entire family crowding around his open coffin, as if pressing him into the
circle of death with which he is so deeply associated. Tommaso, as we are told
in the final, written-on-screen detail, died in bed in April 2000, in his
sleep, as he always wanted. But how could this sleep ever be peaceful? In
Bellocchio, sleep is forever haunted by the ghosts of personal and political,
moral and ethical accountability.
3.
The Causes and The Effects (AM)
The
Traitor is a tightly organised and
hyper-structured film, like the corrupt network it depicts: each moment, each
incident or detail in it has an immediate correspondence or repercussion and
then, further away in time and space, a wider resonance. As a deliberately
hollowed-out version of a classic gangster film, it invests the most basic plot
mechanics of the genre with an eerie fatalism. This process is also
fundamentally cinematic, since what is at stake in the life of a gangster – and
even more so, a traitor – is literally sound and image: making a noise, and/or
being seen, are what will get you killed in an instant; nobody who goes public,
who steps out of the silent shadows as Falcone does, will last long.
The entire film, in
both its form and content, is built on this dynamic principle of image and
sound. Image: Tommaso, in the courtroom, is always attempting (without much
success) to shield his eyes, covering his vision in dark glasses, averting his
gaze from those who want to kill him, walling his whole body in glass
protection. Sound: when Tommaso makes love to his wife, Cristina (Maria
Fernanda Cândido), he places a hand over her mouth to stifle her cries of
pleasure, and instructs her to be quiet. Soon, we will see a different Cosa
Nostra couple murdered (as if in a dream-displacement) naked in their beds,
during sex. Even a family’s most innocent outbursts – like cheering while
watching a soccer match on TV – seem to immediately bring an answering tone of
doom: the mysterious phone call addressed to Tommaso. For sounds not only
betray presence, but also announce menace: the Sicilian folk song that sends
the Buscetta family fleeing a New Hampshire restaurant is verified, six years later in Palermo, enigmatically and sinisterly,
by Pippo singing it to Tommaso in court.
3b.
The Gesture (CM)
The
gesture of Tommaso to Cristina not only demonstrates the film’s unstoppable
sonic tension, but also the possessive character of its protagonist. We know he
is able to make his enemies submit – but that is also true of his women,
whether lovers, prostitutes or wives. When he is arrested at his home in
Brazil, Tommaso vehemently orders Cristina to shut up in front of the police. When
he remembers the past in the company of his Sicilian friend Totuccio Contorno
(Luigi Lo Cascio), he evokes a time when voluptuous women fell into their arms – even while he was imprisoned. The character’s
memory of that conqueror phase in an idealised
Cosa Nostra emerges on screen in an eloquent flashback, which represents the
abysmal jump between the present (in which Tommaso dyes his hair coquettishly
before a mirror to camouflage his ageing) and the past (a prison in Palermo
where the inmates must leave the shared dormitory so that Tommaso can be
intimate with a young woman at his
service). However, this flashback quickly adopts a sick, morbid tone – as
if the character cannot escape these ghosts that haunt him, even when he
recalls his happy days. In the
conjured scene, Tommaso observes that one of the elderly prisoners remains in
the cell, so he approaches the man’s bed and discovers that he has died in his
sleep. Discreetly, Tommaso covers the inmate’s inert body with the sheet,
before returning to his bed where he fucks the prostitute he has previously
invited to undress. Eros and Thanatos are inseparable in his memory.
4. The Karaoke (CM)
The
disquieting Sicilian melody sung by both the musician in an American restaurant
and by Pippo is not the only song we hear twice in The Traitor: the emblematic bolero “Historia de un amor” (“Story of
a Love”) appears in two mirroring scenes that are in dialogue with each other.
First, in the celebration staged by Bellocchio of the 68th birthday of Tommaso
who, in front of family and friends, sings it precariously and emotionally, in
a state of drunkenness. Then, in the sequence before the final credits, where
murky archival video footage of that same birthday party is revived, with the
real Buscetta suddenly on stage. If we focus on the first of these musical
performances, we can see how Bellocchio works with one of the most stimulating (audio)visual
motifs of contemporary cinema: karaoke scenes. The Traitor’s scene does not take place strictly in a bar of this
type: the melody is not completely pre-recorded (there’s a keyboardist playing
live) and there’s no monitor on which the song lyrics scroll. All the same, we
are absorbing a privileged moment, comparable in its form to those that emerge
in works as diverse as Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2013), HHH – A
Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Olivier Assayas, 1999), My Best Friend’s
Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1997), Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002), or the final episode of the fourth season of Better Call Saul (Vince Gilligan and
Peter Gould, 2015-2022).
It
is well known that karaoke scenes can lead to moments of plot inflection, where
characters free themselves from their fears, show us their weaknesses,
transform themselves into different people, and even bring us near the level of
the transcendental. In the case of Favino’s interpretation, there is a noticeable
evolution that Bellocchio demonstrates in a series of shots capturing the
reactions of the spectators: as the performance progresses, we pass from
initial cheerful smiles to solemn expressions. The melancholic tale of this
bolero – which Carlos Eleta Almarán composed in the 1950s following the death
of his brother’s wife – plus the changing expression in Favino’s perspiring
face, with a contained emotion revealed in his saddened eyes, ends up giving
the scene an unmistakeable bitterness. This bitterness can be attributed to the
character’s lament over the passing of time, but also to the insurmountable
remoteness of his native Italy, and a life overshadowed by the weight of death.
It is not surprising that, in this same party, Tommaso eventually confesses that
he is seriously ill, while watching from the distance the guests’ cheerful
“musical chairs” game in which he can no longer participate.
The
final video images give a surplus value to the scene, since they allow us to
determine the similarities and differences between Bellocchio’s Buscetta and
the real Buscetta on the basis of their singing performances. After all,
karaoke is the art of simulation, and this game of appearances finally defines what The Traitor is fundamentally addressing
– since Pierfrancesco Favino simulates a historical character still very present in the imaginary of his country; and,
in turn, the Italian director pursues the elusive identity of a Tommaso who is
variously gangster, hero, traitor, exile and puppet of the State. Thus, an
inscrutable lifetime of simulations,
set to the rhythm of a bolero.
4b.
The Cigarettes (AM)
The
cigarettes form another important motif in the film, another pattern of
comparisons bridging many levels. During the trial, Bellocchio places a quote
from Michel Butor into the mouth of an erudite mafioso behind bars: “The gaze
is the expression of reality”. Butor’s theory is, in fact, very close to
Bellocchio’s method as a filmmaker; as the writer said: “We never look at a
face twice in the same way … we question it differently”. So it goes with the
cigarettes. The intimate (and somewhat aggressive) ritual of a shared puff is
established early, when Tommaso, on their veranda in Brazil, takes Cristina’s
cigarette. Between Tommaso and Falcone, it is a major dealbreaker in establishing
their rapport: Tommaso tells Falcone later that he would never have accepted a
smoke from him if the pack had not already been open …
Cigarettes
(like bicycles) sometimes function in the film to make strange certain events and situations: the mafiosi imprisoned
in their cages during the trial smoke furiously (cigars or cigarettes, it
becomes a legal tussle!). In one of the most striking historical footnotes
presented, it is argued that importing heroin spelt the end of the old Cosa
Nostra; if they had stuck with cigarettes, it all would have stayed fine! And a
cigarette, lovingly smoked and discarded, also figures in the final move made by both the film, and by
myself in this writing-game of simulations …
5. The End (AM)
Film
narratives depend on spectators both remembering and forgetting things. We
remember in order to identify (plots, faces, names, important information), to
keep track of the unfolding story. We forget in order that we might, with a
jolt of surprise or delight, rediscover a detail in all its ultimately revealed
significance. Naturally, this game of simultaneously showing and concealing
things (through underplaying or understatement), so that they can eventually be
uncovered, is a measure of a filmmaker’s storytelling skill: it is an art of wilful misdirection.
In
a stunning game inside The Traitor,
this misdirection comes in the form of a bold sleight-of-hand, a true magician’s
trick worthy of Orson Welles. At 50 minutes into the film, Tommaso begins, with
theatrical deliberation, to tell a story that Bellocchio visualises in flashback.
It is the story of how Tommaso, as a young man, was given a designated hit:
however, this other man, sensing his fate, clutched his newly baptised baby to
his chest, knowing this would avert the assassin’s bullet. Then – jumping
through the years – Tommaso tells us how this target never left home without
his son by his side. “Then the son got married” … but, right there, Tommaso
digresses in order to amplify a general point to his interlocutor, Falcone: in
those days, the Cosa Nostra code meant no killing of children, women or judges.
Falcone begins arguing with him about this assumption of morality and ethics.
And the film pursues this point, instantly going in a new direction.
How
quickly we forget – taken up in the film’s energetic, mosaic flow – that we
have missed the punchline of Tommaso’s story! It was simply pushed aside, just
in the way that windy monologues are often interrupted in real life by
impatient listeners, never reaching their conclusion. Until – a full 90 minutes
of screen-time later! – Bellocchio takes us, via a transitional comparison of
two moons in the night sky, to exactly that untold conclusion, now given
without a narrating voice – Tommaso may be remembering or dreaming it, but he
is no longer in control of it;
Bellocchio has well and truly taken the driver’s wheel.
A
wedding party is ending; the father embraces his son in a fond farewell; a dog
lazily sleeps at the entrance of this ample courtyard. In the present –
allowing a crucial ellipse in the flashback – Cristina gently removes the rifle
from Tommaso’s hand (he, too, now divested of his protection) and covers his
sleeping body with a blanket. Back to the past: guests leave in their cars down
the road behind the dog; the proud father relaxes, alone, pulls up a chair,
gazes up at the moon, smokes and discards a cigarette. Then, as he stands,
there is something in his eyes, his bearing, his gaze, that possibly signals
that he knows exactly what is coming. Tommaso, as if magically, arrives from
the darkness – Bellocchio giving us now an ageless character unconstrained by
strict historical chronology, this could be happening in any year – and carries
out his initial command.
So
much about The Traitor’s deepest
themes is implied here: the ambiguity of honour, the obedient (almost robotic)
carrying out of orders (like another "simple soldier” in The Irishman [Martin Scorsese, 2019]), the question of what
changes and what does not change with time … As Tommaso exits, the film holds
on this final, archway frame (my chosen screenshot) that recalls the opening
verse of Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” (1964):
Down
the street the dogs are barkin’
The
Spanish version of this text appears in Transit: http://cinentransit.com/el-traidor-una-correspondencia/
MORE Bellocchio: Good Morning, Night, Blood of My Blood, Fists in the Pocket, Marx Can Wait © Adrian Martin & Carles Matamoros December 2019 / English translation © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin December 2019 |
