Seeing “Berlinguer – The Great Ambition”, the new film by Andrea Segre on the life of Enrico Berlinguer (played by Elio Germano) can make you cry. Seeing what the Italian people once were, their sense of community, their union in an egalitarian and democratic ideal, when compared to today's selfishness and mass disillusionment, can create an enormous sense of nostalgia. Not to mention the ethical level of politicians like Moro or Berlinguer.
Iosonouncane, Sardinian like Berlinguer, certainly close to him both humanly and culturally, could only be the most suitable musician for the soundtrack of “The great ambition”, which is part of a series of new publications entitled “The sound crossed” which will see the light soon and will collect Incani's music for cinema and theater. The first issue of this series will be “The Great Ambition”, which will be followed in 2025 by the soundtrack of the documentary “Lirica Ukraine” by the talented journalist Francesca Mannocchi.
Incani makes itself available to Andrea Segre's work, trying to continue the path undertaken in his discography. The sounds of “IRA” are in fact still present, although put at the service of the audio-visual format, with the limits and rules that this imposes. However, you can feel the commitment and human closeness that Incani must have felt in writing these compositions, almost as if he were writing the music for a film dedicated to a brother, rather than to a politician who died when he was just one year old.
The central theme has the characteristic of bringing to mind the popular song (“1973”, the year of the American coup d'état in Chile which brought Pinochet to power against Allende), associating a certain solemnity as if the music were dedicated to a popular character, but at the same time loaded with such symbolism as to be transfigured into a hero. Popular and classical music of the 20th century, therefore, seem to overlap, as they have done many times. The intuitions of “IRA” still remain fundamental, from the painful memories of Berlinguer's mother, who died when he was still a child (“Madre”) to the memories of the neo-fascist massacre in Piazza della Loggia in which the synths overlap with the main theme.
Trips to apparently friendly countries of the Warsaw blockade are underlined with particularly claustrophobic music, as in the attack in Bulgaria (“It wasn't an attack”) or in the trip to the USSR (“USSR”), in the dialogue with Brezhnev or in the night scenes of Moscow (“Moscow at night”).
The central theme returns in “The speech at the Kremlin”, a historic speech in which Berlinguer had the courage to reiterate, right in the Kremlin, the profound distance between Italian democratic communism and Russian totalitarian communism. It is bizarre that this sense of oppression recurs only in the scene where President Andreotti (“Julius the Collector”), the standard-bearer of Moscow's rivals, is present.
Andrea Segre clearly underlines the historical passages that characterized Berlinguer's life. From the 34% of the 1976 political elections which opened the two-year period of the historic compromise and made us imagine a collaboration between Moro and Berlinguer, that is, between the DC and the PCI. However, the hopes were dashed by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (“Il rapimento di Moro”), marked with music that recalls the atmosphere of the Kremlin with an “IRA” style synth finale.
“Il funerale di Enrico” closes the album: sung by Daniela Pes, who takes up the central theme, the song serves as the soundtrack to Berlinguer's funeral and becomes a tragic funeral lament which, thanks to the extraordinary archive images, offers the sense of the anthropological mutation that has taken place in Italy in just forty years, where not Berlinguer's human story seems to have ended, but the very soul of an entire nation.
06/11/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
