There are many war films, particularly surrounding the great wars (World War I and World War II), because with all the lives lost war is always a subject filmmakers like to wrestle – to try to come to terms. While some go the heroic, good triumphing over evil, glorifying route to explore this subject, more and more filmmakers are looking at the smaller evils that contributed to all the deaths. The banality of evil, a phrase introduced by Hannah Arendt as part of her subtitle for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem is one such lens people use to highlight the horrors, effectively done in last year’s The Zone of Interest. While set during World War I, I would argue that Battlefield (Campo di Battaglia) also explores the banality of evil.
In Battlefield, we are introduced to some young wounded soldiers in transport. A young man who has just lost an eye in an explosion but he believes that it has saved his life because now he will be sent home. Only once we reach the hospital, we meet Stefano (played by Gabriel Montesi) an army physician who scolds patients for being self-harmers and sends injured patients back off to the frontlines if he deems their injuries not serious enough, including this young man because he still has one working eye. This is because Italy needs soldiers, they need the numbers, and they can’t afford to have any dismissed over injuries that can still fight. So, he’s sending them off to die, for the advancement of Italy, and his prospects at the cost of their lives.
However, he’s not the only doctor at the hospital, there is also Guilio (played by Alessandro Borghi), who has taken it upon himself to save some of these men who do not wish to go back to the frontlines and he does this by exasperating their injuries and making them unfit for service. In the case of our young man who lost an eye, he infects his working eye with gonorrhea so that he can’t see out of either eye, so Stefano will be forced to send him home.
The film also touches upon how classism and sexism played a large part in what people were able to do and how they were tasked to serve their country. It was shown in the film’s lead characters, who all benefited from their association with Stefano’s privilege but we’re constantly reminded of the limitations of their own, and then also in the young soldiers, some who were never granted leave because of where in Italy they were from, and then as we neared the end of the film the civilians who tried to gain access to the hospital as the beginning of the 1918–1920 flu pandemic.
Yes, that’s right, this is another film joining the trend of films wrestling with our current pandemic by looking back at a previous one and in this case comparing the loss of life in a great war that is talked about constantly with the loss of life that has been swept under the rug and ignored for years. The comparisons become startling especially as you watch them downplay it in real-time as they are happening, much like people are still doing now, and it will only be in reflection that we will get the scope. But will we too have to wait over 100 years for these reflections?
Battlefield was written by Alberto Taraglio and Gianni Amelio (Amelio also directed the film), which had its World Premiere In Competition at The 81st annual Venice International Film Festival.
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