Get the latest gossip
‘Battleground’ Review: The Cure is Often Worse Than the Disease in a Turgid WWI Medical Drama
Alessandro Borghi stars as a conscience-stricken doctor tending to injured Italian frontline soldiers in Gianni Amelio's drab WWI medical drama.
This national demoralization — a feeling rather too well evoked by “Battleground”‘s sluggish pacing and disjointed storytelling — is palpable to Stefano (Gabriele Montesi) and his old friend and fellow doctor Giulio ( Alessandro Borghi), who jointly patrol the scrubbed wards of a crowded military clinic in Northern Italy. But instead of pursuing the fraught dramatics of a doctor who feels ethically bound to make his patients sicker — and is perhaps on some level professionally intrigued by the prospect — Amelio’s film, co-written by the director and Alberto Taraglio and loosely inspired by a popular recent Italian novel, opts for an almost comically undercooked romantic angle. But formal polish and some flashes of insight into a terrible historical moment cannot hide the fundamental structural issues, the lack of connective tissue between scenes, the characterization so thin it could have a wasting disease, the sense of whole subplots hacked off like gangrenous limbs that, post-amputation, still give off a persistent phantom itch.
Or read this on Variety