L’abbaglio revisits the first steps of the 1860 Garibaldi campaign to reunify Italy. The stories of a Colonel and two boors intertwine in this initially ineffectual, yet finally incisive comedy movie.
★★★☆☆
L’abbaglio combines the historical figure of Colonel Orsini and the fictitious boors Domenico Tricò and Rosario Spitale during Expedition of the Thousand, led by hero of Italian reunification Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi sailed from Genoa and got off at Palermo, Sicily, with a thousand soldiers.
“It was a special trip, everything was possible in that [historical] moment; the hope that something important and very big could come true, and the danger that nothing could occur. So the two forces of life come into play: the illusion, and the disillusion,” said director Roberto Andò when introducing L’Abbaglio at the film’s Milan premiere. Garibaldi backed the uprisings against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruling Southern Italy at that time. He then became the leader of a five-month revolution that gained momentum, defeated the King and redirected Italian history—like William the Conqueror did for England in 1066.
L’abbaglio tells a twofold story. It centres Colonel Orsini (Toni Servillo, who holds the Colonel’s gravitas throughout), a historical figure who led a decoy outing in the Sicilian hinterland to pave the way for Garibaldi’s conquest of Palermo. Meanwhile, the duo Tricò and Spitale enroll in the squad as improvised soldiers, desert after the cumbersome disembarkment, burn their Garibaldian red shirts and travel in a kind-of-mismatched buddy trip. The two stories merge when the boors are caught by Colonel Orsini’s soldiers and end up playing a central role in the Colonel’s luring mission. Tricò and Spitale are played by Italian comedians Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone, who in English terms are a mix of Mitchell and Webb and Ant and Dec.
L’abbaglio initially trudges, though. Despite popular songs, Italian-dubbed dialects and flawlessly detailed costume designs adding warmth and colour, the picture editing clumsily switches between Colonel Orsini and Tricò-Spitale narrative arcs. The Colonel’s seriousness and the soldiers’ naive humour prevent the movie from taking off. Ironically, historical accounts reported likewise about Garibaldi’s mission during its first two uncertain weeks.
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The Strangeness (2022) was the first successful collaboration between Servillo, Ficarra-Picone and Andò, where the director also played with historical and imaginary characters. L’abbaglio does not reach the same harmony as its predecessor, though, nor does it have the style and grip of recent Italian successes such as There’s Still Tomorrow (2023), Paola Cortellesi’s sentimental working-class drama of postwar Rome.
The filmmaking bites back after the two storylines reconcile and the soldiers return in the peloton. That’s when Andò’s two forces of life, illusion and disillusion, turn his characters around. Colonel Orsini’s vision of triumphantly striking back in Palermo, his native city, is brought back to earth. He must obey orders and serve a greater cause. Tricò and Spitale’s disillusionment—“I don’t give a damn about the Italian reunification,” says one to the other at the beginning—turns into a hopeful proactivity. The two become so hilariously efficient that the decoy expedition does its job of enticing the Kingdom’s troops to the wrong place.
The three protagonists’ paradoxical journey is not the expected result of the movie. The colonel was meant to be successful in his hometown but ended up just having a walk-on part in the revolution. The two impostors became heroes. ‘Abbaglio’ translates into English as ‘blunder’; is the characters’ upheaval itself just such a blunder? The film’s final sequence focuses on this question in Colonel Orsini’s mind. A slow, Sergio-Leone, western-style zoom-in on his dense eyes epitomises his quest for an answer after the revolution.
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Nowadays, at the bar or in TV shows, some Italians ask out of the blue, with a bit of presumption, whether the reunification was a blunder for the richer regions in the North of the country. L’abbaglio elegantly retaliates with satire through a Sicilian story. Has history bamboozled Sicily?
The Verdict
It may be initially dull and slightly long-winded, but L’abbaglio asks a bold, satirical question. It is not a historical treatise on the first two weeks of the Expedition of the Thousand but surfaces an untold, factual story blended well with fiction and comedy.
Words by Michele Crestani
A UK release date for L’abbaglio has not yet been announced.
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