Campo di Battaglia review – medicos face off in stately first world war hospital drama

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.

Amelio is a 50-year veteran of Italian cinema and tackles the action with a robust, old-school efficiency. He mounts a cumbersome, well-acted drama in the wings of the first world war, shuttling from bed to bed to view the bloodied soldiers while clearing space for a lot of hushed conversations in dimly-lit rooms. Anna (Federica Rossellini), a pensive Red Cross nurse, suspects Giulio of being the near-mythic Holy Hand but assumes that Stefano never will. “He loves you too much,” she says, thereby setting us up for the friendship-breaking betrayal that surely lurks around the next darkened corner.

Out on the ward, the army doctor’s life runs to a remorseless daily routine. He examines and stitches and declares the patient fit to fight. But the hospital itself doesn’t exist in isolation, and is rocked by rumbling noises-off. In the dog days of the war, the Spanish flu breaks into Amelio’s handsomely carpentered film like the T-Rex at the end of Jurassic Park. The bacillus, it turns out, is Campo di Battaglia’s big third-act spoiler, in that it spins the tale off in a fraught new direction and frustrates the medics’ carefully-plotted collision course.

Campo di Battaglia is a sober, stentorian affair – but here perhaps is a dark joke at the characters’ expense. Giulio and Stefano have mapped their respective directions of travel and made choices they feel they can live with, only to find that battlegrounds are confounding and lay waste to the script. They find themselves turned around and bamboozled, effectively shot from all sides.

Campo di Battaglia screened at the Venice film festival.