‘Battleground’ Review: The Cure is Often Worse Than the Disease in a Turgid WWI Medical Drama
variety.comJessica Kiang 1918 in Italy was, a title reminds us, “the year of victory.” Yet the first images in Gianni Amelio‘s WWI-set “Battleground” are anything but triumphal: a pile of bloodied soldiers’ bodies glinting wetly in the moonlight; a scavenger pilfering the wallets of the dead; a blanket thrown over a survivor whose gibbering shellshock makes him too abject to look at.
The irony is heavy, the way everything in this stultifyingly serious drama is heavy: the skies, the mood, the movements of Luan Amelio Ujkaj’s stately-to-the-point-of-staid camera.
The year may have ended in victory but for the Italian soldiers fighting on the frontlines, and for a civilian population numbed by loss and wartime poverty, most of 1918 was spent somewhere closer to despair.
This national demoralization — a feeling rather too well evoked by “Battleground”‘s sluggish pacing and disjointed storytelling — is palpable to Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) and his old friend and fellow doctor Giulio (Alessandro Borghi), who jointly patrol the scrubbed wards of a crowded military clinic in Northern Italy.
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