Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Elon Musk performed a straight-arm gesture last month, many quickly interpreted it as the fascist salute first popularised by Benito Mussolini. But Mussolini himself is much less known today — and often disregarded as a historical sideshow.In fact, as a new TV drama shows, his emergence as the first fascist leader of any country has enduring lessons. Mussolini: Son of the Century attempts to capture his unscrupulousness and charm. The parallels with Donald Trump are front and centre.“If you make something about Hitler, there’s nothing but darkness. Mussolini is really dark, but he also employed humour,” says the show’s English director, Joe Wright.Based on the bestselling novel of the same name, Son of the Century drives home how Mussolini’s takeover of Italy was far from inevitable. “There were points all the way along where people could have stepped in and stopped it, and they didn’t take those opportunities.”In 1921 Mussolini’s party won less than 7 per cent of the seats. The next year he was asked to be prime minister. The king, Victor Emmanuel III, had refused to allow the army to crush Mussolini’s thugs as they marched on Rome. The papacy settled for gaining privileges for the church. Socialists had undermined the political system. Industrialists saw fascism as the lesser of two evils. Even then, it wasn’t too late to prevent dictatorship.Wright leans into the contemporary relevance: “We need to stand up against it. It is our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen. If we don’t, we are complicit. At what point do we abdicate responsibility for those we put into power, especially when we’re benefiting or we’re doing all right?” The FT gave the series five stars. Luca Marinelli, who plays Mussolini, put on 20kg for the role — transforming himself from “one of the most beautiful men in the world” (Wright’s words).Wright previously directed the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour, lionising Winston Churchill for his defiance of Adolf Hitler. But Churchill declared himself “charmed” by Mussolini. “It’s a testament to Mussolini, because he did seduce not just Italy but the world,” says Wright. “Narcissists are often very charming. They have an ability to sniff out what people want and give it to them.”Mussolini’s character sometimes speaks directly to the camera, intimately telling the audience he betrays everyone eventually. These asides were intended to be in English, while the rest of the show is in Italian. But politics intervened. While the show was in rehearsals, Giorgia Meloni, who started her political career in a neo-fascist party, became Italy’s prime minister. “The next morning, I went into the studio and said, I want every single Italian to understand every single word,” says Wright.Now it’s not just Italians who might want to listen closely. Bullying humour is just one similarity between the show’s Mussolini and Trump. “Slippers are a man’s undoing,” the fictional Mussolini berates his wife at one point. There are other parallels: the focus on what is beautiful, and the lack of obvious morality or fixed ideas. Wright likens how Mussolini twisted the betrayal felt by Italian first world war veterans to how Trump mobilised the anger of “left-behind” American voters. “Make Italy Great Again,” Mussolini tells the audience, in the one line that remained in English.Yet no one has stepped forward to broadcast Son of the Century in the US. “It’s brought home to me how apolitical Hollywood is,” says Wright. “The film industry there as individuals are very political people, and they’ll donate and hold fundraisers. But in terms of what they will back, they’re incredibly apolitical.“There was one streamer, who said, ‘We love the show . . . However, it’s a little too controversial for us.’ Wait a minute, when did anti-fascism become controversial? That really shocked me, because our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers fought defending us against fascism. Is their sacrifice also controversial?”Wright, 52, started off political. As a teenager in the 1980s, he went on anti-nuclear marches and deployed the term fascist without precise meaning: “The police were fascists, and our schoolteachers were fascists if they kept us late.”For much of his career, however, politics took a back seat. He learnt directing from his father; his parents ran a puppet theatre in Islington, north London. In the 2000s, he directed Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, before some lower-profile productions. “The most difficult thing about my job is figuring out what stories to tell. And sometimes I’ve got that really wrong.” His interest in politics was revived by travelling to the Democratic Republic of Congo to research a play about the former leader Patrice Lumumba.With Son of the Century, his insight was that the novel — a mixture of imagined scenes and documentary evidence — lent itself to an “almost cubist aesthetic.” The staging is often hallucinatory, testing its credibility, but Wright dislikes his work being called theatrical. “Anything that isn’t realism is termed theatrical, which seems to me a misuse of the word. The intention is to be cinematic.”He is also untroubled by occasional anachronisms. Son of the Century has a techno soundtrack written by one half of The Chemical Brothers; it also features Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love”. Wright’s Darkest Hour showed Churchill conversing with the public on the London Underground, something that would never have happened. How does he respond to those who prioritise accuracy? “You just have to make choices. And I’m at the service of my craft.”Wright was nervous about directing actors speaking Italian, not knowing the language himself. “I don’t know if it would be possible, if I didn’t speak English, to direct English actors. The heritage of English acting is very text-based. The heritage of American acting is very psychoanalyst-based. The heritage of Italian acting is commedia dell’arte, so it’s incredibly physical and tuneful. What I discovered is I could understand the truth of what they were saying just by watching and hearing the tune.”Mussolini’s humour was “the thing we were all most worried about”; it is not present in the original novel. Both Marinelli and the novel’s author, Antonio Scurati, were “nervous” about the scripts. “I kept on assuring them that it wasn’t a comedy . . . Mussolini has been treated as a clownish buffoon, and he wasn’t that: he used humour sometimes but it wasn’t who he was.” The quantity of fascist violence in Son of the Century makes it impossible for the audience to sympathise much with Mussolini.The eight episodes centre on the leader, his associates and his mistress Margherita Sarfatti. Wright declined the producers’ suggestion of editing them down into a 150-minute film. “We just couldn’t see a way to make it work, because it’s about the mundane minutiae of the descent into dictatorship.”The minutiae make the story, he insists, while rolling a cigarette. “If you try to make something universal, it never is. If you just focus on the specifics of the time and the place and the characters, people are able to project themselves into it.”As for solutions to today’s polarisation, Wright admits: “I don’t have any answers.” But having thought hard on what fascism means, he now sees a lack of meaning. “There is a void at the centre of fascism, and certainly at the centre of Mussolini. It constantly eludes definition, because it’s always against something, but never for anything. There’s a line in the show where Mussolini says: fascism is everything and the opposite of everything . . . He was just the uber-opportunist, so — whatever suited him at any given moment — that was fascism.”‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ is on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK
