Sono tornato

Sono tornato (Italian: Sono tornato, lit. 'I am back') is a 2018 Italian satirical comedy film about Benito Mussolini directed by Luca Miniero,^[1][2] based on the German film Look Who's Back, in turn based on the satirical novel of the same name. The film, like the film it is based on, features unscripted vignettes of Massimo Popolizio as Benito Mussolini interacting with ordinary Italians, while interspersed with scripted storyline sequences.

Plot

Rome, 2017. Benito Mussolini (Massimo Popolizio) falls from the sky in front of the Alchemical Door. As he wanders, disoriented since he still ignores to be in the 2017 (he will discover this later) and thinks to be in the 1945, through the city, he interprets modern situations and things from a Fascist perspective.

Meanwhile moviemaker Andrea Canaletti (Frank Matano) is fired by the television station MyTV, for which he was filming a movie in front of the Alchemical Door and despondently decides to watch the movie he had been filming for MyTV and see in the background Mussolini. So he decides to search him in the hope of getting his job back and after some time he is able to find him.

Canaletti, that, and not alone, believe Mussolini to be just a comedy actor, and Mussolini both agree to travel together across Italy; Canaletti because he wants to make a documentary that may lead him to success, while Mussolini wants to assay Italians' mood in the hope one day to return to power.

While they are travelling, Mussolini begin to make questions and to interact with Italians while he is filmed by Canaletti but then there is an argument between them when Mussolini shoots a dog with a concealed pistol. Anyway, despite this, he decides to continue the documentary with him.

In a short time the duo gather an huge pool of consents and finally, since the continuing growing huge popularity of Mussolini, whose ideas are becoming accepted by more people, the ambitious Katia Bellini (Stefania Rocca), new chairman of MyTV, decides to create a new television show dedicated to the dictator.

The show makes the fortune of both Mussolini that continue to gain other consents and even catches the attention of foreign media and of Canaletti that is soon rehired and promoted. Only few people openly criticize the fanatical and populist rhetoric used by Mussolini and the media circus created by it and completely useless are the warnings of some member of MyTV to not celebrate much the character in the name of the satire and of the show needs.

But things begin to go wrong for them when one of the executives of MyTV discovers the unedited footage of Mussolini shooting the dog during his travel across Italy with Canaletti, and out for revenge against Bellini, since she went over his head, airs the footage while Mussolini is having a television debate with Enrico Mentana, ruining so the careers of Mussolini, Canaletti and Bellini.

Without an house to stay neither a job Canaletti and Mussolini decides to stay for a while in the house of Canaletti's girlfriend, Francesca (Eleonora Belcamino), which Canaletti was able to seduce also thanks to Mussolini. But here Francesca's grandmother (Ariella Reggio), survivor of the Raid of the Ghetto of Rome, has an argument with Mussolini and Canaletti, disgusted at this point by Mussolini's ideas, decides to distance himself from him.

By then being alone, Mussolini one night is violently beaten up by some masked men; in a first moment it seems that he was beaten by a group of animalists provoked by the shooting of the dog but in reality it was orchestrated by Bellini to return to the limelight on a television station rival to MyTV while Mussolini falls in love with her, since he revises in her his mistress Claretta Petacci.

Meanwhile Canaletti rewatch his recordings done before he met Mussolini and he sees the apparent comic falling from the sky and so he decides to return to the place and here he understands that the legend that says that the door is a portal between the land of the living and the afterlife is real and finally understands that who he always believed to be just an actor is really Mussolini.

Bellini, taking advantage of the beating, is able to organize another show with Mussolini and so regaining money and success. Canaletti anyway is able to steal a pistol from a policeman and bursts in the television studio while they are filming the show of Mussolini and try unsuccessful to convince people that who they think is just a comic interpretating Mussolini is actually the real Duce. He continues to aim and to threaten Mussolini but, even if he has the possibility to kill him, in the end he decides to not shoot him because he doesn't want to lower himself to his level and so is arrested.

By now completely rehabilitated by Italians, even the dog's owner decides to pardon him on live television, Mussolini is ready to use his charisma, his huge popularity and the media to retake the political power in Italy.

Cast

Production

The film was filmed on different Italian locations as Rome, Naples, Milan, Florence and in Umbria.^[2][3]

Distribution

The film was released in Italy on February 1st 2018 and was distribuited by Vision Distribution.^[1]

Box office and reception

The film received some comments by movie critics focused on the reflection brought seeing the movie about an hypothetical return of Mussolini and Fascism in Italy. For example Boris Solazzo of Rolling Stone said "[The film tells us] how much the current world is fascist, hypothesizes how Benito Mussolini, in 2018, would be accepted. Triumphantly. Like all national populists after him. And now".^[4]

Luca Cardarelli of Cinematik said that the hardness of some scenes is a plot device used to make the viewer indignant, to encourage it to a "serious reflection on today's Italian civil society and mediatic society and on the actual risks of a "What if story".^[5]

Maria Teresa Ruggiero of Universal Movies said "Luca Miniero never reveals a judgment on the figure of Mussolini, he shows it as a mask, a character that fits perfectly in the television lounge, as it happens with the participants of a reality show. "Sono tornato" seems to be more a reflection of the media parable, of how they are used today and how, the public, even forgive a homicide of dogs through a TV-truth mechanism".^[6]

For Paola Casella of MyMovies the film lost the opportunity to be more critical towards Fascism and said "Sono tornato aired a month from the vote and is clearly intended as a pre-election warning. But its potential effectiveness, as comic as it is pedagogical, is thwarted by the choice (...) of never facing Fascist ideology in its danger, nor in its ridiculous component, to focus on the figure of a man who expresses himself for famous phrases: phrases that, taken out of context, can appear as pearls of wisdom. (...) In this way it is neither an antidote to History that repeats itself, nor a ridicule of certain "tummy reasoning" so popular in our day. It is not even politically incorrect enough to really make people laugh, limiting ourselves to painting our age as more confused than amoral, more solitary than egocentric, more tenderly nostalgic than tenaciously reactionary. Which, on the eve of the elections, is at least questionable".^[7]

Raffaele Meale of Quinlan instead lamented the mediocrity of the plot and of the scenes, in particular a scene filmed inside of a Neo-Fascist circle of Rome and said "Sono tornato can not handle the heretical and comic potential at the same time inherent in the project, and moreover chooses positions to say the least embarrassing, as the clearance of a phantom neo-fascist party (CasaPound? Forza Nuova? Who knows, maybe a mix between the two components) in whose headquarters Matano and Popolizio go as if they could be part of a democratic path of the nation".^[8]

For Mariarosa Mancusa of Il Foglio the movie is "quite depressing" especially because of the lack of gags in the second part of the movie and said "Benito Mussolini wins his television show, and boasts a remarkable following of Italians "when he was there" (trains arrived on time, Italy was respected, we had the land in the sun). They are not all nostalgic, at some age does not even allow it. They are convinced that the problems of today's Italy are identical to those of the time, and that only the strong man can solve them. Ready to take a selfie, to try a Roman salute, to be moved by a dead dog more than for the racial laws".^[9]

The film in the first 2 weeks after the release grossed 2.2 millions euros and was listed for a Nastro d'argento and after The Post and Maze Runner: The Death Cure was the film that grossed more on 1st February 2018 in Italy.^[10][11]

References