He built up violent paramilitary gangs and terrorised political opponents, suspended democracy in favour of a dictatorship that would inspire nazism, and plunged his country into a bloody war.
But a major new biographical series about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dares us to feel sympathy for the bull-necked creator of fascism, if only to demonstrate his diabolical charm.
In a first interview about his series M: Son of the Century, the British director Joe Wright told the Guardian: “What I hoped to do in the show is sometimes allow the audience to be seduced by Mussolini and to get excited by what he’s doing.
“To demonise these characters absolves us of moral responsibility and I think that’s really, really dangerous,” added Wright, who is best known for the period dramas Atonement and Pride and Prejudice.
The eight-part biopic will premiere at the Venice film festival on 5 September before being released by Sky next spring. It does not so much analyse fascism’s origins as dunk the viewer straight into the bath of blood, sweat and male testosterone that gave rise to the cult around the man his followers called Il Duce.
Mussolini, a former editor of the Italian Socialist party’s official newspaper who fell out with the left over his support for the first world war, is shown as a morally corrupt individual, but also as a canny political operator who is able to temper his taste for violence for strategic gains.
The torchlit night-time rallies of the brutish and black-shirted fascisti are underscored by an intoxicating techno soundtrack courtesy of Tom Rowlands, one half of the British electronic music duo the Chemical Brothers. Stylistically, Wright said, the serial biopic had become “a mashup of Scarface, Man With a Movie Camera and 90s rave culture”.
The series makers say that if there are moments where viewers catch themselves being swept along by the propulsive energy of the politician’s rise to power, that is precisely what they intended.
In Italy, the series is certain to touch a nerve. M is based on the first instalment of Antonio Scurati’s “documentary novel” by the same name, a 2019 winner of the prestigious Premio Strega book award that has sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide but divided critical opinion at home.
While some reviewers, such as Luca Mastrantonio on the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, praised the book as a “literary inoculation” against the return of fascism, others have suggested that Scurati’s focus on Mussolini’s biography has inadvertently helped normalise the founding father of fascism and his ideas.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University, has described M’s project of revitalising anti-fascism by immersing the reader in fascism’s cult of brutish male power as “paradoxical”.
Evidence of its inoculating effect has yet to materialise. Since the publication of the first part of Scurati’s series in 2018, Italy has elected its most rightwing government since the second world war, led by a prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has neofascist origins – even if she is at pains to distance herself from what she has called “the cult of fascism”.
Speaking to the Guardian, Scurati nonetheless insisted that in order to strengthen anti-fascism, stories about the movement’s historical roots could no longer rely purely on the point of view of those it persecuted.
“The reason why I started writing on Mussolini all those years ago was because I felt an urgent need to break what I call the victim paradigm,” he said. “I am fully convinced that Italy and Europe will never fully come to terms with fascism if we neglect to address a fundamental fact: we were fascists. All of us were seduced. We have to feel accountable for that chapter in our history.”
Scurati’s painstakingly researched “documentary novels” – the third instalment of which, M: The Last Days of Europe, was published in 2022 – tries to stop the reader being sucked too deeply into Mussolini’s toxic psychology by juxtaposing fictionalised monologues with archive documents, such as newspaper articles and secret police reports.
“I somehow created a new fictional method that had little to do with fiction,” Scurati said. “I relinquished all the tools a writer can use to describe Mussolini’s emotions.”
Wright’s series, with a screenplay by the Gomorrah scriptwriter Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, opts for a different, more high-risk strategy: “to build that empathy and then to pull the rug out and say ‘Wait a minute, do you realise what you’re engaging with?’”, as the director described it.
Throughout M, the actor Luca Marinelli’s buffoonish Mussolini breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience, inviting them to join his cause: “Follow me, you’ll love me too. I’ll make you a fascist.”
While M: Son of the Century is not the first screen portrait of the Italian dictator, previous films have mostly focused on figures on Il Duce’s periphery, such as his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini and I), or his first wife, Ida Dalser (Vincere). A 1993 TV mini-series with Antonio Banderas as the titular protagonist, Benito: The Rise and Fall of Mussolini, drew criticism for romanticising the strongman leader.
Reviving the deadly dictators of Europe’s 20th century on screen continues to be seen as a risky artistic enterprise. The German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall broke taboos around the filmic depiction of the man who adopted and adapted Mussolini’s brand of fascism, Adolf Hitler, but was strongly criticised by film-maker colleagues. In an article for newspaper Die Zeit, the German director Wim Wenders accused Downfall of being inexcusably neutral towards Hitler by declining to show his dead body.
Asked whether he could imagine making a similar series about Hitler, Wright said: “I’ve no idea. I don’t really know how to answer that.”
The taut moral arc of M: Son of the Century leads from Mussolini’s start as a rabble-rousing underdog in Milan’s tavernas to a pivotal moment in June 1924, when his career came close to being ended over the death of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who had been kidnapped and murdered by fascist paramilitaries.
Facing an outraged parliament, Mussolini took responsibility for the murder as head of the fascist party and dared his critics to prosecute him. By failing to seize the opportunity, they enabled Italy’s descent into a full dictatorship.
When originally conceiving of the series, Wright said the plan was to have Mussolini’s dialogue in Italian, but the direct addresses to the camera in English.
He abandoned the plan after Meloni took office in October 2022. “At that point,” he said, “we decided that I wanted every single Italian to understand every single word.”
• This article was amended on 18 August 2024 because an earlier version mistakenly gave Benito Mussolini’s birthplace as Milan. He was born in the small Italian town of Predappio.
