For the filmmaker, returning to this Italian tragedy twenty years after his film "Buongiorno, notte" was "very important".

"I have a totally different look today, less political," he told AFP.

When "Esterno Notte" (Night Exterior), presented out of competition Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, begins, Italy is torn by political violence, which opposes the Red Brigades, the main armed organization of the far left, and the State.

In a gesture of appeasement, and against the pressure of the Western bloc, the president of Christian Democracy Aldo Moro decides to ally himself with the Communists.

On the very day of the installation of the new government, Moro is kidnapped during a Red Brigades ambush in which his five bodyguards are killed.

A shock, a trauma for all of Italy, which then saw "its first live tragedy", in the words of Marco Bellocchio, 82, who told AFP: "there was no 24-hour TV / 24 like today, but everyone read the newspapers".

After 55 breathless days, punctuated by false press releases, letters of supplications from the hostage, Aldo Moro is killed.

"Many young people at the time were for this kind of revolutionary operation which had been a great success, but no one expected such an end".

When "Buongiorno, notte" remained "inside the prison", "Esterno, notte" shows almost nothing of Aldo Moro's captivity.

The maestro took advantage of the format of the series to scrutinize the powerful of the time: the Minister of the Interior Francisco Cossiga, whom the tragedy made physically ill and left on the verge of dementia, or even Pope Paul VI, who was struggling against a body at the end of its life to try to save that of Aldo Moro by secretly negotiating his release with the backing of wads of cash.

Dilemma

In each episode of the series (6 x 50 minutes), Bellocchio dwells on a protagonist of this tragedy, with great reinforcements of close-ups: Aldo Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) himself, Cossiga therefore (Fausto Russo Alesi) and Paul VI, excellent Toni Servillo.

Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, in Cannes, May 17, 2022 Valery HACHE AFP

Nanno Moretti's muse, Margherita Buy, marvelously embodies the wife of Aldo Moro, alone in the face of mediocrity and the impotence of the "great" in power.

A political class is starkly portrayed by Bellocchio: helpless in the face of the violence of the Red Brigades, mean-spirited when it comes to safeguarding its places in government, out of place when it offers premature condolences to Eleonora Moro.

Through the character of Adriana Faranda, passionaria of the movement involved in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, Marco Bellocchio approaches with finesse the dilemma of a revolutionary whose certainty "at a given moment, enters into crisis".

This single mother, in a free couple who sacrificed her daughter, in her words, out of revolutionary romanticism, embodies with far-left students the clash of generations, with parents under the yoke of the Catholic religion and the family as an institution. sacred.

The series is presented in the "Cannes Première" selection, a year after the Palme d'honneur awarded to its director for his entire career.

The first part of "Esterno notte" will be released in cinemas in Italy on Wednesday, then will be broadcast on television in the fall, on Italian Rai, and simultaneously in France on Arte (which co-produces the series).

© 2022 AFP