These words are the inspiration for title of the Marco Bellocchio's Buongiorno, notte (Goodmorning, Night) and they reflect the protagonist’s desire in the film to be part of "day" but who surrenders to "not so fair – midnight" when day refuses to take her in. The protagonist of Buongiorno, notte is Chiara ("light" in Italian) a girl who works office hours at a public library, but who harbours a big secret inside her spacious Roman apartment: not only is she part of the communist terrorist faction the Brigate Rosse ("Red Brigades"), but she helped carry out the violent kidnapping of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and now keeps him hidden behind a partition of bookcases.

 

The film is inspired by the real events surrounding the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro (here portrayed by Roberto Herlitzka), though it remains still far from clear even today what transpired exactly during the more than fifty days that he was detained. The script, written by director Marco Bellocchio, imagines Chiara (Maya Sansa, the photographer from La meglio gioventù/The Best of Youth) to be part of a group lead by Mariano (Luigi Lo Cascio, also from La meglio gioventù) and which also includes Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) who pretends to be Maya’s husband for the outside world. For convenience, they both keep a wedding ring in a small box close to the door for when they go outside. Chiara is the only woman amongst the revolutionaries and makes sense from a storytelling perspective: her soft outsider status makes it easier for the audience to identify themselves with this group.

 

Bellocchio has turned the kidnapping into something of a Kammerspiel in the large but dark ground floor apartment, in which the members of the Brigate Rosse take turns to give the Prime Minister his food or force him to write notes to the government. The film does not seem to be too concerned with the actual political implications of the act; there is little explanation as to the background of the Brigate Rosse other than short and vague talk about "the revolution" and Chiara’s dreams in which we see archive footage of Russian communism under Stalin. If you are no expert on recent Italian history, this film will not solve that lacuna.

 

Instead, what Buongiorno, notte tries to evoke is a lyrical meditation on the act of kidnapping a powerful person (the kidnappers keep on referring to Mr Moro as ‘Presidente’ throughout) rather than a painstakingly created reconstruction of events. The cinematography and production design by long-time Bellocchio collaborators Pasquale Mari and Marco Dentici underline this notion with their presentation of the large apartment as a claustrophobic, dark open space where diffuse light filters through the blinds and where the dark-light contrasts are high. Mr Bellocchio only partly succeeds in making his filmic meditation work, however, especially since none of the kidnappers ever succeed in convincing us they are real people, least of all Chiara.

 

In what feels like a deus ex-machina moment in which Mr Bellocchio the screenwriter himself is lowered onto the stage, Chiara seems to be visited at work by a guardian angel (in the form of a student) who has written a story about a kidnapping called Buongiorno, notte, a copy of which was also amongst the personal papers of Aldo Moro at the time of the kidnapping. When things take a turn for the worse, the brave student tells Chiara he has changed the ending and lets the only female kidnapper betray the other kidnappers by setting their captive free. “Imagination has never saved anyone,” Chiara tells him. Perhaps she should have told the director.

 

Perhaps the director should have paid more attention to what Emily Dickinson so elegantly worded and which were obviously an inspiration for Mr Bellocchio: why did Italian society - and its ally the USA ("day") turn its back on the extreme left for so long and thus allowed them to embrace violent terrorism ("not so fair midnight")?

 

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