★★☆☆☆
It was supposed to begin with lightness, froth, stars, sex and tennis. But because of the Hollywood actors’ strike the Zendaya sports dramedy Challengers was yanked from the opening-night slot at the Venice Film Festival. And in its place? Something similar — frothy, sexy? Well, it’ll certainly be titillating for the Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party, for whom Comandante could play as a recruiting campaign.
By genre it’s a Second World War submarine movie (Das Boot, U-571 etc). It’s also a deeply strange endeavour that has elements of perfume commercial (topless women in tableaux) and magic realist fable all contained within a propaganda message machine that never stops bleating about the singular greatness of “this wonderful chaos that is Italy”.
Pierfrancesco Favino, so mesmerising this year in Nostalgia, stars as the real-life sub commander Salvatore Todaro who, in October 1940, against the advice of his superiors, rescued 26 enemy sailors from a Belgian merchant steamer that he’d just sunk in the Atlantic. Favino’s Todaro, as written by the director Edoardo De Angelis and Sandro Veronesi, is vaguely psychic, wears a back brace, is called a “wizard” by his men and describes himself as “the craziest, wildest commander in the Royal Italian Navy”. He’s an inspirational leader, half Tom Hanks in Greyhound, half Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, and early on whips his seamen into a frenzy with a motivational rant that ends on a repeated chant of: “We’re not arseholes!” Obviously, replies the film’s subtext. They’re Italian!
There are some classic submarine movie moments, including the high-tension dice with the depth charges, the downward plunge and the sudden loss of power. Plus there’s an utterly fabulous, and indeed frothy, scene between the Belgians and the Italians, cramped in the galley and discussing the absence of “frites” from traditional Neapolitan recipes: “They fry everything else in Naples, so why not potatoes?”
But too much is unfocused and, in storytelling terms, vaguely haphazard. The postscript notes that out of 112 submarines that the Italian navy put to sea during the war, 19 returned. It would suggest that Comandante wants ultimately to be a film about self-sacrifice, tragedy and the pointlessness of war. Yet it keeps leaning into something different and less nuanced. Why, Todaro is eventually asked, did he and his men break with protocol and rescue the Belgians? “Because we’re Italians!” he answers. Of course.
Released in cinemas in 2024
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