Italian actor Luca Marinelli stars as the titular character in limited series Mussolini: Son of the Century, which will be released weekly on streaming service Mubi.Mubi
Mussolini: Son of the Century, an intensely stylized new French-Italian historical series and origin story of the Italian dictator, aims to turn its viewers into fascists.
Or, at least, that’s the stated goal of main character and narrator Benito Mussolini, played with sweaty, scenery-chewing glee by the Italian actor Luca Marinelli.
Il Duce speaks directly to his audience in this miniseries, like Frank Underwood on House of Cards and Shakespeare’s titular Richard III before him, explaining his constantly shifting plans and point of view as he both kisses and kicks behinds on his rise to power.
“Follow me, you’ll love me, too,” Mussolini says to the camera. “You’ll become fascists, too.”
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Personally, I was unconverted after watching the first four of eight hour-long episodes of the limited series, which will be released weekly on streaming service Mubi starting Sept. 10.
(Mubi has started to add TV shows to its stable alongside documentaries and independent and art films; it’ll, notably, be the Canadian home for Wong Kar Wai’s series Blossoms Shanghai in 2026.)
Unlike with Tony Soprano or Colin Farrell’s The Penguin, two small-screen anti-heroes Marinelli seems to nod toward in his performance, I was never seduced.
Mussolini: Son of the Century, based on the stylish novel by Antonio Scurati, is too feverishly directed by British director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour) to ever get comfortable with anything or anyone on screen.
But, thankfully, Mubi has not positioned it as a binge-worthy series; it would best taken in at a maximum of an hour a week.
In this moment where fascism is fashionable again, it’s worth re-exploring or discovering the movement’s roots – in the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, or Italian Fasces of Combat, founded by Mussolini in 1919. (The series, like the book, only goes as far as 1924.)
If you’re not alarmed that a Futurist-inspired art gallery called Fiume opened in New York this year, the first episodes are a useful primer on that odd episode in proto-fascist history where the Italian poet and general Gabriele D’Annunzio (Paolo Pierobon) led troops loyal to him to occupy the city of Fiume after the First World War and declared the Italian Regency of Carnaro.
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There’s also a cameo by violence-loving Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Stefano Cenci) – whose sound poetry underscores scenes of brutal attacks by fascists upon socialists along with pounding electronica beats created by Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers.
Wright overindulges in such swirling sequences – close-ups of spinning grenades, intercut with Mussolini’s face and gory violence – that the story is lost in style. There’s a lot of shadows and mirrors and switching from darkly lit colour sequences to black and white.
(The aesthetic at times summoned up memories of a different nineties British electronic outfit called The Prodigy – and its in-yer-face music video for Firestarter.)
This lack of subtlety can be invigorating at times, but weakens the effect at others. No one needs Mussolini to stare right at the camera and emphasize that he wants to “Make Italy Great Again.”
But the script by Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, borrowing from Scurati’s potent prose, is more fascinating than not in its search for a definition of the slippery anti-politics that is fascism.
The anger of the followers of the newspaper editor Mussolini, a former Socialist, is always more clear than their aims; they mainly seem motivated by wanting to “own the libs” as the online blackshirts say today.
“Benito, did you create fascism to make revolution or to beat up socialists?” his deputy Cesare Rossi, a trade unionist turned fascist, asks him.
“Fascism is everything and the opposite of everything,” Mussolini declares later at a dinner party with his rich mistress Margherita Sarfatti (Barbara Chichiarelli), who accuses him of being further left than the socialists on many issues.
Later still, Mussolini addresses a room full of angry Great War veterans disgusted by his pivot toward attempting to gain power through elections.
“We are a syntheses of all affirmations an negation,” he tells them. “We, fascists, have no preconceived ideas. Our only doctrine is action!”
Perhaps that explains Wright’s approach to directing this alternatively engrossing and off-putting series: Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
