MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Open Doors’ Engages the Intellect

“Open Doors,” the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is an unusually rigorous and intelligent movie. It’s an example of what is often disparagingly referred to as an “intellectual” film--that is, a movie that deals in ideas and issues the way a work of literature might.

“Open Doors” was, in fact, adapted from a novel by Leonard Sciascia, whose books have been the basis for some of the most interesting, and least heralded, Italian films of the last several decades--among them Francesco Rosi’s “Illustrious Corpses” and Elio Petri’s “We Still Kill the Old Way.”

Set in fascist Italy in 1937, “Open Doors” isn’t quite on a level with those films; it’s a bit too measured and drawn out, and it lacks verve. But the intelligence on display in this film is never clinical; it’s keyed into the emotions of its characters. Technically, everything holds together, from the austerely beautiful cinematography by Tonino Nardi to the jarring, expressive score by Franco Piersanti. It’s a movie about the nature of repressive regimes, and it is an eloquent brief against the death penalty. Such is the quality of feeling in this film that it’s not necessary to subscribe to its ideas in order to be caught up by it.

That great actor Gian Maria Volonte plays the judge, Vito Di Francesco, presiding over a grisly multiple murder case involving a Palermo man (Ennio Fantastichini) who, all on the same day, methodically murdered the boss who fired him, the man who replaced him at work and his wife. (The film’s R rating is for explicit sex and violence.) Since the man readily admits to his crimes, it appears his fate is sealed--in fascist Italy the death penalty is strictly enforced. What’s more, as a hard-line fascist himself, he appears to invite his own execution. He wants to be martyred, and he’s infuriated by the judge’s principled attempts to discover extenuating circumstances in order to spare him the firing squad.

It would have been easy for the director, Gianni Amelio, and his co-screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami, to stack the deck by making the condemned man a repentant sufferer. By presenting him as a cur, the film (at the Music Hall) seems to be making a philosophical argument against capital punishment; it holds that the state doesn’t have the power to take away life-- any life. Likewise, the fact that the film is set in fascist Italy should not be interpreted too literally. The film’s philosophical argument is meant to apply to all repressive societies. As the judge says at one point, “The death penalty benefits the governors, not the citizens.”

Gianni Amelio, 46, has been making movies since 1970, but most of them have been for Italian television. Film festival-goers may know him from his 1976 documentary on the making of Bertolucci’s “1900,” or his 1982 “A Blow to the Heart,” starring Jean-Louis Trintignant. Like Trintignant, Gian Maria Volonte is an actor who can convey a character’s intellectual processes in a way that doesn’t close off our involvement.

Volonte makes the tensions of thought palpable, and Amelio, who is remarkably tactful, never lets our gaze waver. He respects the silences as well as the exhortations, and that gives rise to some wonderful passages, like the scene where the judge visits the condemned man’s scared, silent son in a hospital. What comes through in this scene is the same emotion that came through at the end of De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief”--a supreme sympathy for the sanctity of children. It eloquently bolsters the film’s argument for the sanctity of all life.