"Good Morning, Night": The killing that shaped modern Italy
I'm not sure any non-Italian can make sense of Marco Bellocchio's "Good Morning, Night" without a bit of a history lecture ahead of time, which is probably why (like almost all of Bellocchio's 22 previous films) this won't reach much of a foreign audience. Even if you do know something about Aldo Moro, and why a homegrown Italian terrorist group called the Red Brigades kidnapped and then murdered him in 1978, Bellocchio's film is a challenging and eerie work, possessed of a resonance for contemporary Italian viewers that outsiders, me included, can only make guesses about.

Unlike, say, Bruno Barreto's excellent "Four Days in September," which tells the story of the kidnapping of the American ambassador by Brazilian radicals in more or less linear, thriller fashion, "Good Morning, Night" is an expressionist portrait, blending archival news footage with naturalistic but enigmatic scenes and fanciful dream sequences. It isn't much constrained by the actual history of the Moro kidnapping -- and indeed, as Bellocchio has pointed out, the actual history of the event is none too clear. Was Moro's killing just the result of deranged revolutionary fervor (which was indeed endemic to the '70s European left), or were other forces involved: Italian neo-fascists, the CIA, the Vatican, the Masons? Bellocchio doesn't support any of these borderline-crackpot theories, but he doesn't quite rule them out.

Moro was the leader of the Christian Democrats, a conservative Roman Catholic who was nonetheless instrumental in forging a historic compromise in postwar Italian politics: In 1978, his party was prepared to form a national government that would include the Communist Party for the first time. But on his way to a crucial legislative meeting, Moro was attacked by a small group of heavily armed guerrillas who killed his five police bodyguards, packed him in a moving crate and spirited him away. The Red Brigades' attempts to negotiate a prisoner exchange went nowhere, and so did police attempts to rescue him. After 55 days of imprisonment in a Rome safe house, Moro was shot dead and dumped in a car, midway between the Christian Democrat and Communist headquarters.

As presented in "Good Morning, Night," the tiny group of ideologues holding Moro captive do indeed believe that their action might incite a revolution, or a fascist coup, or something to destroy the unstable status quo. But all the political drama presented in this movie -- the stone-faced public officials in newsreel footage; Pope Paul VI, looking three-quarters dead himself; fascists giving each other the stiff-arm salute in a restaurant; communist workers boarding a bus with red flags -- is basically background for the story of Chiara (Maya Sansa), a young, dowdy-looking librarian who is in fact the only female member of the inner Red Brigades circle.

Although Chiara is a committed Brigatista, or at least starts out that way, we never really learn why. The pieces of her story come together only gradually; at first all we know is that she has rented the apartment where Moro is stashed, posing with a fellow guerrilla as an ordinary young married couple. In a funny-scary early scene, a neighbor dashes by to drop off her baby for a couple of minutes; Chiara looks at the little creature with mingled fear and disgust, but it's the sort of routine favor no young Italian woman is supposed to refuse. She stashes the baby on the sofa, handling him as if he were a ticking bomb -- and then her compadres come lurching through the room, carrying the former prime minister in a packing crate.

Some of what we see is what is really happening, in the film's universe; the Brigades pester the doleful Moro (a wonderful performance by Roberto Herlitzka, who's the spitting image) to grind out letters to his family, his political allies and the pope, while it gradually dawns on the guerrillas that they're going to have to either kill him or let him go. But increasingly, "Good Morning, Night" is dominated by elements of Chiara's other life, and by her fantasies and dreams. She has an office romance with an appealing guy -- who, mysteriously, is the author of a screenplay Moro is carrying when kidnapped. She dreams about her childhood, about World War II and her dead father's past as an anti-fascist resistance fighter. She forms a father-daughter bond with Moro, falls in love with him a little, dislikes his formality and humility. (Almost all of that is in her head, although Moro, who never sees his captors' faces, asks at one point: "Is there a woman among you? I can tell by the way my socks are folded.")

If you just want to know what happened and get a reasonable guess as to why, I'm told that the book "The Moro Affair," by Leonardo Sciascia, is the way to go. Marco Bellocchio is performing an act of something like Jungian therapy on his nation, unpacking the most traumatic event of its recent history as a concatenation of dream symbols, and also as an allegorical way of addressing the tortured state the Western world, beset by terrorists both real and imaginary, finds itself in today. It's a strange and murky movie, at times a frustrating one, but I also found it profoundly moving in a way no regular thriller ever is.

"Good Morning, Night" opens Friday at the Cinema Village in New York. Other cities may follow.

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