Retelling the brutal story of Aldo Moro — a moderate in a time of extremism

It began one spring morning on a quiet street in Rome on March 16 1978. Two government cars found themselves ambushed on a narrow street and a hail of bullets burst from a group of assailants dressed — in a surreal detail — in uniforms of the national airline Alitalia. As the noise of the machine guns echoed through Via Fani, Aldo Moro, head of Italy’s main political party, the Christian Democrats (DC), was bundled into a waiting car that screeched away. The bodies of his police escort were left bleeding in the street.

The lead-up to these dramatic events and their brutal aftermath are grippingly recounted in a new Italian TV series, now coming to the UK on Channel 4, Exterior Night, directed by veteran film-maker Marco Bellocchio.

For a whole generation of Italians, the “Moro Affair” holds the same epoch-defining importance as the assassination of John F Kennedy or 9/11. Everyone knows where they were when they heard the news. Bellocchio, the 83-year-old film director and co-writer of the series, remembers state schools being shut down and children being sent home. “They thought that there might be further attacks,” he says via Zoom.

His own reaction was one of shock, but mixed with ambivalence. “I was no longer as radical as I had been,” says the former member of the Union of Italian Communists (Marxist-Leninist). “For a lot of young people there was something almost like enthusiasm — in a way unknowingly. They weren’t thinking of the poor victims who had been killed. It was seeing the state being defeated. It was shocking that a small group of terrorists had kidnapped a man of such political importance.”

The “small group of terrorists” were members of the Red Brigades, an extremist leftwing group that modelled itself on Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang. Moro had been a dominant figure in postwar Italian politics, serving as prime minister several times. A moderate in a time of extremism, he even brokered deals with the Communist party, sworn enemies of his own party. (If you want to avoid spoilers, skip the next paragraph.)

This led many to blame the Italian government’s intransigence for his ultimate fate. After being held for 55 days, and despite mass demonstrations and appeals from the trade unions and even the Pope, Moro was murdered and left in the boot of a car, halfway between the Communist Party headquarters and those of the DC.

As Bellocchio puts it: “Moro was a sacrificial victim, a little like Jesus Christ. He had to die because the two world powers preferred the status quo to continue; they wanted the cold war to continue. And so this man, who with patience, tenacity and deliberation sought compromise, someone who was a reformer, had to disappear.”

While older Italians will be familiar with the historical events, international audiences may be shocked to discover what transpired. With an excellent cast — Fabrizio Gifuni is superb as Moro and Toni Servillo (star of The Great Beauty) plays Pope Paul VI, a friend of Moro’s — and more twists than a bowl of fusilli, the series may do for Italian political thrillers what Gomorrah did for its gangsters. Each episode takes a different point of view — Moro’s own, that of his wife Eleonora, played by Margherita Buy, even that of the terrorists.

Violent national events are often fertile ground for conspiracy theories, and the involvement of the CIA and of the Italian security services, whom many accuse of playing an ambiguous role, are explored. “There are many different opinions about the Moro affair, but we wanted to give those which have prevailed, which have been affirmed both by the state and by the terrorists. Many historians suspect that things happened differently.”

It’s like when anything traumatic happens to you, you find yourself reliving it, rethinking it in the following days, months, years

Bellocchio himself has already tackled the subject on two previous occasions, first in a 1995 documentary and then in a 2003 feature film, Good Morning, Night. I ask him why he returned to the subject. “It’s like when anything traumatic happens to you, you find yourself reliving it, rethinking it in the following days, months, years.”

Has anything changed in the interval? “Even when we made that film in 2003 there was still an ideological rage,” Bellocchio says. “It’s subsided now, so I’m free to tell the story from the point of view of the characters. And so we could explore how Moro’s wife felt, and talk about the [minister of the interior Francesco] Cossiga and the Pope, and also show the two terrorists Faranda and Morucci, who during the kidnapping found themselves further and further away from the position of their comrades in the Red Brigades. We tried to create a work that was closer to characters than simply to political positions.”

Bellocchio is curious to see how non-Italian viewers will react, having found that even young Italians are largely unaware of the case. “Parents have had to explain how such an absurd and tragic thing could happen,” he says.

The series, which in Italy is shown on Netflix, has been greeted with enthusiasm but not the controversy he expected: “The French get angrier. They still feel the tension in politics,” Bellocchio says.

As for the political situation in Italy today and the rise of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government, he is surprisingly sanguine: “I don’t think there is a real danger of a fascist restoration because when a party becomes the government they become more moderate.”

Bellocchio first found success in 1965 with his debut feature Fists in the Pocket, a remarkable portrait of a dysfunctional family that broke with the neorealist tradition that had dominated Italian cinema since the second world war. A contemporary of such legendary figures of Italian cinema such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci, Bellocchio is now the last man standing of his generation. But he has never rested on past glories. He makes exciting, important films about important subjects, whether it’s Mussolini’s secret lover in Vincere (2009) or a mafia supergrass in The Traitor (2019).

Earlier this year, his new film Kidnapped screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, yet he already has another mini-series planned on a miscarriage of justice — “the case of a famous television presenter Enzo Tortora unjustly accused of being a member of the Camorra and [involved in] drug trafficking”. But this is only one project among many “still in the planning stages.”

In fact, our conversation is cut short because Bellocchio has somewhere to be — a script conference, a pitch meeting. After more than 60 years as a film-maker, he is still a busy man with a lot of stories to tell — and retell.

From August 20 on Channel 4 in the UK

Letter in response to this article:

Filmic focus on two very different Italian leaders / From Allen Tobias, New York, NY, US