Papa Carlo and his team – Weekend – Kommersant
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Amediateca airs the series The General’s Team about the legendary General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who defeated the Red Brigades in the 1970s and fell victim to the Sicilian mafia in 1982. We have seen the history of the war between the Italian police and the Cosa Nostra and the terrorists in many films and TV series shot in fresh pursuit. The distance of 40 years makes it possible to see her heroes and anti-heroes a little more complex than Commissioner Cattani.
General Dalla Chiesa was shot dead in Palermo with an AK-47 on the evening of September 3, together with his wife, when they were driving in a car to have dinner – the killers fired from a motorcycle. Two years later, in 1984, the film One Hundred Days in Palermo was released in Italy, dedicated to the general’s hopeless struggle with the mafia. Lino Ventura, wearing a general’s mustache, played a monument to a doomed warrior whose battle was initially lost, and a couple of years later, Dalla Chiesa spoke in the Soviet box office in the voice of Dzhigarkhanyan. At the same time, the Soviet television screens were conquered by the TV series “Octopus”, where the honest commissioner Cattani in an eternally wrinkled jacket was a doomed fighter against Cosa Nostra – judges, policemen and carabinieri were killed in Sicily one after another, and then films “based on” were released. Filmed 40 years later, the Italian series about Dalla Chiesa is originally called “Il nostro generale” (“Our General”), and in this title one can hear the echo of the words “Cosa Nostra”. But it does not look like a monument – in the story of the “Red Brigades”, everything, as they say, is more complicated.
This story is told on behalf of the young romantic Nikola (Antonio Folletto), who came from Apulia to Turin – in the midst of the economic crisis, he was lucky to find a job as a carabinieri and not hunchback at the factory for a pittance. The year is 1973, and there, in Turin, veteran Dalla Chiesa (Sergio Castellitto) is sent from the south to fight the Red Brigades. They are still quite herbivorous: all their activity for the most part comes down to the Marxist-Leninist agitation of the workers, the printing of leaflets and the creation of strike committees. If they kidnap people, they take pictures against the background of the red flag to send the photo to the press, and release them unharmed, like Judge Saussy. But soon the “brigades” will become radicalized, and Dalla Chiesa will understand that there is only one way to catch them – to infiltrate their people into the damned Marxists.
The smart Nikola gets into the detachment of such special agents. Their task is not to be like the Carabinieri. “Get dressed!” says Captain Bonaventure (Alessio Pratico), as a team of heroes in hippie attire, with long hair and beards, “like straight from Woodstock” line up in front of him. But the catch is that the members of the general’s team look like brigadiers not only outwardly: they are the same hard workers who need social justice, and the workers’ struggle for their rights is close to them. Even Dalla Chiesa’s own son, student Nando (Luigi Imola), whose hair irritates the general, understands that the “brigades” are not the mafia, and there is a rational grain in their struggle with the state. The general knows this and one day he can’t stand it: “Why do you children hate us so much? We ended the war with a broken back and handed over to you, at the very least, but a revived country!” And he receives a reasonable answer: “You were too carried away by the program and did not notice that the country was split.” Historians will later call this split the “lead years” of Italy.
With the mafia, everything is simple: they are bandits. But at first it is not clear to everyone that the “Red Brigades” are the same bandits and terrorists. Nicola will understand this when the brigadier shoots the carabinieri in front of him. And then they will tell him that the carabinieri deliberately finished off the wife of the leader of the “brigades” Mara Cagol (Marina Savino) with shots during the arrest, and he will wrinkle in pain – soon his face will take on the same unchanging expression that it was on Commissioner Cattani, who lives in the thick of violence and anxiety. But if the commissioner had only one truth, then Nikola is oppressed by doubts. But in war you have to choose a side, and he chooses. The general requires the team to follow two main rules: “Never talk to journalists. And make decisions according to the situation without fear – I will be responsible for your mistakes.
“Lead years” for Nikola are now flying fast as bullets, under the cover of the general’s father figure. If the carabinieri are forbidden to talk to journalists, then the brigadiers shoot the “wrong” journalists in the legs – this is called “de-legging”. “They live like monks, they only shoot people. Their gospel is an urban guerrilla. To infiltrate the “brigades”, we need a communist” – and the general finds him. This is Silvano Girotto (Daniele Mariani), a former priest sent to the very heart of the “brigades”, thanks to which the general’s team makes the first arrests. Only a year later, politics from Rome (as we remember, Commissioner Cattani also constantly traveled to Rome for advice and help) disband the general’s team, because “terrorism is a phenomenon associated with industrial regions, and there are no factories in Rome.” Ironically, the decision to disband the team will be supported by Aldo Moro — and the rest is history. Nikola will live this story in its entirety, and through his eyes we will see its finale, those very “hundred days in Palermo.” But the series, unlike the old film shot in hot pursuit, gives its interpretation of why the general went to a new, lost war: because he took on the role of a father and wanted to calmly look into the eyes of those very, ever-doubting children.
Look: “Amediateka”
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