El Alamein is a movie well deserving of being watched and appreciated. Surely one of the best Italian movies from the turn of the millennium, and a an apt and just requiem for those who gave their lives, or their best years, in the sands of Sahara. The ensemble of imagery and music is haunting enough to give us an idea of what war in the desert was. The director takes no definite political stance, limiting himself to describe things as they historically were for too many of our soldiers and officers. The young student volunteer, Serra, goes to war excited at the prospect of conquering Egypt, but being a well-read, clever boy, soon realizes the failure of Mussolini's army, and the power of the British and Commonwealth enemy. The other roles are a bit more rhetorical, in the sense that they recall some old clichés: the wise sergeant, the numbed-out lieutenant, living in a sort of permanent shell-shock and crushed under his responsibilities. The best part of the movie is the dry (we are in the desert, aren't we?) narration of the soldier's life, made of boredom, heat, dirtiness, thirst and hunger, with sudden moments of absolute panic when the Brits, an ominous presence in the (short) distance, send ahead a marksmen, or launch random artillery or mortar attacks. The night battle scenes are short and frantic, while miles away from the video clip style so dear to Americans. They are made really creepy by a haunting soundtrack, plus some quite gory and realistic depictions of wounds, shell-shock people going crazy and disappearing on the battlefield and so on.It was just and sobering to end the movie on the sight of the memorial to Italian soldiers fallen at Alamein. That's what remains, of all that action, of all those futile efforts to swim against the current of history. A country tragically defeated, since then only partly free, subjected, in one way or another, to its captors, deeply divided and at the same time always ready to the serve the strongest: that has been the enduring legacy of Fascism. Maybe those dead, despite having fought for the wrong side, deserved better: they themselves were the betrayed.

The problem with this movie is not so much the movie itself, though the movie does not lack in technical glitches, but rather the historical context in which the story is set. The director tries to tell a story about Italian soldiers in World War Two, suggesting that they are hapless victims of incompetent commanders who basically had them fighting in a hopeless cause, period. This narrow theme produces a two-dimensional story that completely ignores the fundamental reason why the Italians were in the fighting in the first place: to achieve the strategic goals of Adolf Hitler. As a result, this movie is dramatically flat. The Italian soldiers are portrayed as self-sacrificing, suffering and heroic when in fact they were invaders who were brought all their problems on themselves. In an interesting twist, the British are portrayed as faceless automatons who mercilessly drive through the depleted Italian lines, as if it were the British who were the bad guys. That the Italian soldiers were capable of acts of courage on the battlefield is not the question. Rather, the question is why were they fighting in the first place, and any movie, especially a movie that is set in World War Two, that avoids dealing with that question is fundamentally flawed.

How to make a film in Italy.A script that has anything original or "important": war is bad, that's it. But it's a "liberal" point of view, so it's good and it's enough.The same actors seen in every Italian film adding the usual comedian out of a night show (Favino) to have a "known one", and an homage to "bigger names" of the director's circle, giving a cameo to Orlando (Moretti's best one) and Cederna (Salvatore's own).Bad acting: in Italian, every actor murmured in some local "patois", and hardly you can understand what they say. That's a cliché of every Italian war movie, that Italian soldiers uttered strong local accents: war movie or comic film. Not else.Even budget wasn't SO low, no attempt to research what's the right uniforms, vehicles, terms, historical details, as none of the blue-nosed liberal producers wants to talk with the "militarist" who collect or study military history.Spice all with "I'm an artist" attitude, and you have a typical Italian movie.

It's the day to day effort(s), the gradual grinding down, of the "ignoto" (the "unknown" soldiers) that make wars of attrition like this one worthy of closer scrutiny. It's fertile ground for filmmakers, though it's ground seldom tread. (Most filmmakers opt for grandiose depictions of the Big Battles and totally ignore or dismiss outright the many unsung smaller battles that make up a war.) One of the most effective shorts I ever saw was A TIME OUT FOR WAR. Based on an Ambrose Beirce short story and featuring Barry Atwater (who played the vampire Janos Skorzeny in the original telefilm THE NIGHTSTALKER), A TIME OUT FOR WAR was set during The Civil War and focuses on a couple of Yanks dug in across a small creek from a Rebel soldier. They take pot-shots at one another from time to time in the name of God and country and all that, but finally decide to call a truce long enough to take a dip and get a sip from the aforementioned crick. Things seem to have taken a turn for the civil when one of the Union soldiers finds the water-logged body of a fellow blue-belly in the water. The Reb watches as the two Yankees retreive the dead man... and the short ends with them resuming hostilities. EL ALAMEIN reminds me of that short and, in like fashion, leaves one shaking one's head at the madness of Men who would make war on other Men (for whatever "reason"). Don't miss it.