Here is the upstanding infantryman of this year’s Venice film festival competition: dogged and decent, doomed to be gunned down by the judges. The festival likes to find room for the occasional domestic production in the main programme, a film that’s happy to ride its home-turf advantage but is otherwise there to make up the numbers. Gianni Amelio’s tense wartime saga is better than most but that counts for little when the battle heats up.
It is 1918, “the Year of Victory”, although in smalltown Italy it feels more akin to defeat. Alessandro Borghi and Gabriel Montesi play Giulio and Stefano, two childhood friends who work as doctors in a military hospital that has become a battleground of its own, toiling to patch up the casualties and truck them back to the front. Stefano is straight-backed, by the book, intent on freeing the beds as quickly as possible. Giulio, meanwhile, moonlights every night as “the Holy Hand”, deliberately infecting and maiming his patients so that they might be sent home. Both men in their way are playing God on the ward. Each eventually risks regarding the other as the devil.
