‘The Mattei Affair’ or — Now THAT’S How You Make a Biopic!?
First, a quick history lesson -
On the 27th October, 1962, the private jet of Enrico Mattei, left-wing president of the state controlled energy organisation ENI, crashes on a return flight from Sicily to Milan instantly killing Mattei, his pilot and Time-Life journalist William McHale. The official verdict is mechanical failure but with the evidence destroyed, witnesses reporting the plane exploding mid-air and the wreckage strewn over a wide area a number of people suspect assassination.
Yet the most compelling reason to suspect murder, aside from the frequent death threats Mattei received, is his list of powerful enemies with his determination to break the monopoly of the Seven Sisters (the seven big oil companies), his fight to ensure any wealth went straight to the Italian people and not private profit plus his willingness to deal directly with Africa and the Middle East meant he quickly incurred the wrath of the C.I.A., the oil industry, the mafia and the French secret service. It’s not simply that assassination seemed a possibility but more an inevitability.
As with director Francesco Rosi’s best work ‘The Mattei Affair’ (1972) leaps off the screen with an urgency that’s palpable and grabs the attention with a ferocious immediacy. It opens with the crash before jumping back to investigate the period leading up to Mattei’s death with Rosi’s typical documentary, fact-based approach forensically shifting through time and events much like with his highly influential 1962 ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ (imagine a sort of neorealist ‘Citizen Kane’ if you want a rough idea of what to expect).
Yet Rosi’s “documentary” analysis doesn’t mean his film is anything other than emphatically cinematic: pillars of flame tower into the night sky of African oilfields; fighter jets intercept private flights against piercing blue airspaces; multiple TV screens fracture our attention and the lights of an International Style office building flickering to life pull the film into the realms of the geometric. Rosi might capture the “everyday” but it’s with an incredibly sophisticated artistic eye.
There’s another nicely handled moment when we see Mattei shouting at the staff of an ENI hotel only for the film to hard-cut to a shot of him in a helicopter looking down at some frightened sheep, smiling to himself with satisfaction as he watches them scatter. It’s an example of the way Rosi highlights some of Mattei’s contradictions: he’s left wing but happy to do business with fascists; orders all chauffeur driven cars for ENI employees to be immediately axed only to then buy himself a private jet.
Then something radical happens — the films cuts to Rosi himself in his editing suite as we observe the director putting the film together. Why the shift to the meta-cinematic? It transpires that in the course of making the movie an investigative journalist researching the film was “disappeared” by the Sicilian mafia whilst on the verge of making a potential break through on the still unsolved Mattei case meaning Rosi can’t help but be pulled into his own movie (real life has encroached into the film because the film has intruded into reality) and those previously mentioned levels of urgency and immediacy become practically vertiginous.
There’s a reason fans of Rosi hold him in such high regard and ‘The Mattei Affair’ is another blistering example of exactly why. That combination of clear sighted intelligence (Rosi’s film demonstrates just how profoundly idiotic Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ actually is), fearless investigating and visual dynamism, along with another powerhouse performance by Gian Maria Volonté, results in a work that is as vital as it is compelling. And when Rosi is as his vital and compelling best then no one else comes close to touching him.
