A.k.a. The Five Days of Milan

D: Dario Argento. S: Dario Argento, Nanni Balestrini, Luigi Cozzi, Enzo Ungari. P: Claudio Argento, Salvatore Argento. Cast: Adriano Celentano, Enzo Cerusico, Glauco Onorato, Marilù Tolo, Luisa De Santis. Italian dist (DVD): Medusa.

Feeling that he had temporarily exhausted the possibilities of the giallo after 4 Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), director Dario Argento decided on a complete shift of gears for his next project, a reconstruction of a key moment in Italian history: five days of intensive street-fighting which took place in Milan in March 1848, and saw local revolutionaries succeed in expelling Austrian troops commanded by Marshal Radetzky (a war hero back home, with a famous Strauss march named in his honour).

For non-Italians, a little background detail may be of help. The so-called “Risorgimento” period of cultural nationalism, a reaction to centuries of foreign occupation and exploitation, saw three main factions (predominantly bourgeois) fomenting unrest: Mazzini’s radicals demanding a republic; the clerical groups a Papal federation of Italian states; and the moderates (middle-class businessmen and landowners) the unification of a monarchist Italy. While the five-day conflict began a chain of events leading ultimately to Italian self-governance, Le cinque giornate’s mood is anything but celebratory. Most of the 409 Milanese killed in the fighting were lower-class artisans – expendable tools, some might say, of bourgeois opportunism. Taking a leaf from his mentor Sergio Leone’s cynical Fistful of Dynamite (1971), Argento serves up a freewheeling farce lampooning the abstract ideals for which the working classes (here, and throughout history) must lay down their lives.

The Italian political landscape of the early 1970s was, to say the least, volatile. The Red Brigades, based mainly in Milan and Turin, were just beginning their struggle for “worker’s liberation”, although they would not commit their first political murders until the year after Le cinque giornate’s release. By 1973, the mood of radicalism had spread even to more moderate filmmakers, though Argento (and his 4 Flies co-scenarist Luigi Cozzi) had little interest in left-wing rhetoric. While Le cinque giornate resembles in part the Zapata Westerns popularised by Sergio Corbucci and Franco Solinas, sharing their Commedia dell’arte antics and picaresque action, it diverges from that model in one crucial respect. Where those films articulate unmistakeably pro-revolutionary ideals, Argento’s Five Days (like Leone’s Dynamite) voices a profound disillusionment with the apparatus of revolutionary activism. Its leaders are rogues and opportunists, who have only their own interests at heart. For Argento, “revolution” is a synonym for betrayal.

Through the eyes of petty thief Cainazzo (Italian pop star Adriano Celentano) we observe the escalating horror and absurdity of the internecine squabbling between competing factions of the Risorgimento. Escaping from prison thanks to the intervention of a stray cannonball, Cainazzo reluctantly allows hapless baker Romolo (Enzo Cerusico, very different here from his turn as a detective in Argento’s “Il Tram” episode of La porta sul buio/Door into Darkness [1973]) to accompany him through the battle-strewn streets of Milan in search of easy pickings, but their half-hearted criminal enterprise is forever interrupted by fanatical bands of armed Republicans, Austrian artillery and persistent women (insatiable or gravid). Buffeted from one outrageous situation to the next, Cainazzo is frustrated throughout by distant glimpses of his former criminal partner Zampino (Glauco Onorato), now transformed into a dashing hero of the people under the nom de guerre Libertà. But ideals of democracy, justice and heroism prove to be illusory constructs in the service of political expediency and human greed, and by the tragic conclusion our surviving protagonist has realised the sorry truth: that we have all been lied to.

Argento peppers the film with a distracting pot-pourri of filmic styles and references – suggesting, on the face of it, a lack of self-assurance. There’s a nod to Kubrick in Giorgio Gaslini’s synthesized arrangement of Rossini’s “Thieving Magpie” (a comical theme for Cainazzo’s character, accompanied by Clockwork Orange-style undercranked motion); an echo of Peckinpah in the slow-mo bloody violence; a touch of Buñuel in the irreverent caricatures of nabobs and clergymen; and more than a hint of Fellini in a comical interlude with a grease-painted aristocrat and his feral, sexually-indiscriminate granddaughter. But could this seemingly haphazard checklist of quotations be cleverer than it seems – reflecting, perhaps, the fragmented persona of a pre-unified Italy, pulled this way and that by competing cultural influences? Well, perhaps; the hypothesis, however, is not entirely persuasive.

That’s not to say that the film is devoid of native invention; the fluid camera glide that leads us to gaze down the barrel of a loaded cannon as his directorial credit appears on-screen is the first proof that we are very definitely watching Un Film di Dario Argento. And some of the satirical content does hit the mark, especially the barbs aimed at Italy’s socio-political elite. Aristocracy, monarchy and church are often presented as distant abstractions, no more meaningful to those dying on the streets than the gods of Olympus. The absent King, Carlo Alberti, is represented in one throwaway shot by a prop crown and a red velvet backdrop; Pope Pius IX by a disembodied mitre and a white satin curtain. Of the upper classes we see only their feet; concealed under a banquet table, our low-born hero observes his betters at play, their finely-shod hoofs unwittingly mimicking their pomposity, coquetry and blowhard arrogance. (Argentophiles will note the similarities between this sequence and the floor-level tracking shot in 2001’s Nonhosonno/Sleepless, in which a killer – represented only by his shoes – selects his next victim from a crowd of passersby.) But serious points are almost always eschewed in favour of crude slapstick (usually scatological) which almost always outstays its welcome, and goes some way to confirming that this is an arena the director was hereafter well-advised to abandon.

Detailed discussion of Argento’s elusive fourth feature is conspicuous by its absence, at least in English; even the major books covering its director’s career devote little more than a few grudging paragraphs to this rarely-seen title.* Much of this is due to the film’s wilfully-esoteric subject matter (“I wanted to make it specifically for my country and my people,” Argento remarked in Fangoria #34); 19th Century Italian political history isn’t what you’d call export-friendly and, with the exception of a French VHS release, the film does not appear to have been released anywhere outside its native borders. What small body of criticism does exist adheres to the consensus that it’s a parochial misfire, a misguided attempt by Argento to break away from the “Italian Hitchcock” image which the success of the Animal Trilogy (and, on the small screen, his controversial show La porta sul buio) had etched into the public imagination. But for all its failings, Le cinque giornate deserves attention for the tantalising glimpse it gives us of the alternate creative path Argento might have taken towards the mainstream. Much as Cainazzo pursues his idealised mirror-image Zampino, Argento seems to be catching sight of his own double disappearing around the corner in the streets of Milan, a double he willingly allows to slip from his grasp…already aware, perhaps, that the dream of mainstream acceptance is only an illusion…and already planning the quantum leap that would elevate his next film, Profondo rosso/Deep Red (1975), to the pantheon of all-time greatness.

If this is ultimately a chaotic and unfocussed aberration in Argento’s filmography, those selfsame qualities also make Le cinque giornate essential viewing for anyone interested in building a complete picture of this extraordinary director. Failed experiments often yield intriguing results, and even Argento’s lesser works offer some illumination of the alchemist’s innermost workings. With the release in Italy of Mondo’s restored DVD, there’s even less excuse for the dedicated Argentophile not to explore the lesser-known politico-comical facets of their favourite black-gloved auteur. It’s a quality presentation, offering an anamorphic 2.35:1 image, 5.1 Italian audio and Italian subs for the hard-of-hearing. Sadly (if unsurprisingly) there are no English options, but a subtitled bootleg doing the rounds of the grey market might be a worthwhile investment to help make sense of the occasionally dense agitprop dialogue. There’s a certain softness to the image on occasion, but it’s colourful and, with a couple of exceptions, blemish-free. Given the unlikeliness of an English-language release in the near future, this might be your best bet for this title.

* To be fair, even Argento himself has few fond memories of the film. According to Alan Jones’s indispensable “Profondo Argento”, his cast pressured him into taking over the director’s reins – shades of Sergio Leone’s own Fistful of Dynamite, an admitted inspiration – and Argento apparently found the prima donna demands of star Celentano so wearing that he contracted hepatitis. His view of the film now: “a strangely awkward little film that reflected the turbulent times and my political influences.”