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A story ripped not from the headlines but from the history books, Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night is based on a political kidnapping that shocked Italy a quarter of a century ago. In 1978, a group of Red Brigade members snatched and later executed the country's former Prime Minister Aldo Moro (played by Roberto Herlitzka). Recreating events with the help of TV news footage, this thoughtful historical drama focuses on terrorist Chiara (Maya Sansa) as she questions the rightness of her cause.

Imprisoning Moro in a makeshift room behind a bookcase in their suburban apartment, the four revolutionaries plan to use his life as a bargaining tool. But as the days drag on it becomes clear that the authorities aren't going to negotiate and Chiara and her friends realise that they are going to have to kill the silver-haired old man to make their point.

"MOMENTS OF QUIET POWER"

There are moments of quiet power in Bellocchio's unhurried drama as it charts the gradual disillusionment of its anti-heroes. As the men argue politics and philosophy with soft-spoken Moro, Chiara begins to fantasise about his escape - her sleep invaded by strange dreams about the old man wandering the apartment, as well as news footage of fascist atrocities and TV reports about the kidnapping taken from Italy's archives.

Written before 9/11, this has less to say about contemporary terrorism than the decline of the radical European left. Bellocchio, a former Communist party activist, keenly appreciates the way in which the just causes of the past have been replaced by an uncertainty of action and purpose. True, Good Morning, Night offers little psychological or even political insight into the cause of these Marxism-spouting ideologues. Yet the film's poignant strength lies in Sansa's silent, almost unfathomable conversion from wide-eyed believer to guilt-ridden doubter, as she begins to realise that tyranny is still tyranny - whether it comes wrapped in The Red Flag or marches in fascist jackboots.

In Italian with English subtitles