Two doctors with opposing ideologies must choose between friendship and the fate of the wounded front-line soldiers entrusted to their care in this dull film by Gianni Amelio.
Toys take revenge on their factory owner's murderer by brutally torturing them!!
In Italy, 1918 was, a title reminds us, "the year of victory." Yet the opening scenes in Gianni Amelio's World War I-set "Battleground" are anything but triumphant: a pile of bloodied soldiers' bodies, glistening wetly in the moonlight; a scavenger plundering the wallets of the dead; a blanket draped over a survivor, his babbling shell-shock making him too miserable to look at. The irony is heavy, the way everything in this staggeringly serious drama is heavy: the skies, the mood, the movements of Luan Amelio Ujkaj's stately, almost sedate camera. The year may have ended in victory, but for the Italian soldiers fighting at the front and for a civilian population numbed by wartime loss and poverty, most of 1918 was spent somewhere closer to despair.
This national demoralization — a feeling all too well evoked by the sluggish pace and disjointed storyline of “Battleground” — is palpable for Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) and his old friend and fellow doctor Giulio (Alessandro Borghi), who patrol the scrubbed wards of a busy military clinic in northern Italy together. The pair share an inexplicable but seemingly deep bond, despite their very different views on the proper interpretation of their Hippocratic Oath in wartime. Stefano, stolid, repressed but fiercely aware of his patriotic duty and deeply contemptuous of “traitors” who would use their injuries as an excuse to avoid further fighting, is all too willing to hasten a recovery or declare an obviously ailing patient fit to return to the front. Giulio, stiff, repressed but acutely aware of the hypocrisy of sending young men to their likely deaths when he himself has escaped such a fate, is increasingly moved to help his patients be sent home instead. Even if in many cases that means deliberately mutilating them or otherwise making them sicker than they already were, with their consent.
Unbeknownst to Stefano, Giulio has set up an operating room in the small attic lab ostensibly used for his ongoing experiments with bacteria. After hours, and in between fiddling with petri dishes and microscopes, he “treats” a steady stream of fervently grateful, war-weary patients, either giving them venereal diseases that leave them deaf or performing only marginally necessary amputations. The sheer variety of maladies on display results in some impressive prosthetics: perhaps the most valuable technical contribution comes from the makeup department, which cuts a neat, crude line into festering lesions, crusting eye infections, and gangrenous wounds wrapped in clumping, torn bandages.
