1918 in Italy was, as the title reminds us, “the year of victory.” Yet the opening images in Gianni Amelio’s World War I film Battlefield are anything but triumphant: a pile of bloodied soldiers’ bodies glistening in the moonlight; a guerrilla stealing the wallets of the dead; a blanket thrown over a survivor so emaciated by shell shock that he can’t be looked at. The irony is heavy, as is everything in this grimly serious drama: the sky, the mood, and Luan Amelio Ojcaj’s soberly solemn camera movements. The year may have ended in victory, but for the Italian soldiers fighting on the front lines, and for the civilian population bereft and impoverished by wartime, much of 1918 was spent in a place close to despair.
This sense of national frustration—a feeling so well evoked by the slow pace and incoherent narrative of Battlefield—is palpable to Stefano (Gabriel Montesi) and his old friend and fellow doctor Giulio (Alessandro Borghi), who together guard the wards of a crowded military clinic in northern Italy. The two share an unexplained but seemingly profound bond, despite their differing views on the proper interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath in times of war. Stefano, hardened and repressed but keenly aware of his patriotic duty and deeply contemptuous of the “traitors” who use their injuries as an excuse to flee combat, is more than willing to rush a seemingly ill patient to convalescence or declare him fit, if it means he can send him back to the front. Giulio, hardened and repressed but keenly aware of the hypocrisy of sending young people to their likely deaths when he himself had managed to escape such a fate, became more inclined to help his patients return home instead, even if in many cases this meant deliberately maiming them or, with their consent, making them even sicker than they were before.
Unbeknownst to Stefano, Giulio has set up an operating room in a small laboratory in the attic, which he is to use for his ongoing experiments on bacteria. After hours of work, fiddling with petri dishes and microscopes, he “treats” a steady stream of grateful war-weary patients by giving them venereal diseases that render them deaf or performing minor amputations. The sheer variety of diseases on display gives rise to some impressive prosthetics: perhaps the most valuable technical contribution comes from the make-up department, which treats suppurating lesions, crusted eye infections and gangrenous wounds, which are wrapped in torn, clotted bandages.
At times, as Giulio approaches his dubious mission with an almost antisocial severity, there’s a glint in his eyes that hints at the more interesting film—and character—this could have been. But instead of following the frenetic drama of a doctor who feels morally obligated to make his patients sicker—and is perhaps somewhat professionally fascinated by the prospect—Amelio, co-written by the director and Alberto Tarraglio and loosely based on a recent popular Italian novel, opts for a largely immature romantic angle.
Anna (Federica Rossellini), a nurse who attended the same university as Giulio and Stefano but whose brilliant medical career has been stymied by institutional sexism, arrives at the clinic. Although Anna is as rigid and repressed as her lovers—her expressions range from stern disapproval to utter panic—and although there is so little chemistry on display that it is difficult to know which of the men is more deserving of her unbridled affections, she hesitantly reveals a love triangle so dormant that it could grow an antibiotic mold. This might actually be useful, as Giulio speculates—a full decade before the discovery of penicillin—that the Spanish flu pandemic, which has just begun to grip the already war-torn region, might be best treated with mold spores.
There are some period details here, and a well-realised atmosphere that is both sterile and sickly, as befits a war clinic that works ruthlessly to prioritise the military over medicine. “Kill! Kill!” an old woman shouts at the young guard who won’t open the gates to the growing number of desperate feverish local children being turned away from overcrowded civilian hospitals. But the formal polish and some flashes of insight into a horrific historical moment can’t hide the underlying structural issues, the lack of connective tissue between scenes, the characterisation so thin it could have been a scrawny illness, and the sense of entire subplots being severed like gangrenous limbs that still itch like a ghost after amputation. “Battlefield,” though at its most dramatic, life-or-death, lurches from one disappointing climax to the next, and when the real suffering, carnage and devastation of the epidemic abound, it’s hard to relate to such pretence.
