Avis des critiques

The cycles of violence and revenge, cowardice and ruthlessness in the film’s exuberant opening feels like a mob-movie parody, but it is Bellocchio’s commentary on the genre’s stranger-than-fiction conventions, challenging the audience’s now-degraded responses.

Without entirely denying his audience the pleasures of the gangster genre — or of his own brash, baroque, sensual cinematic style — Bellocchio strips away accumulated layers of romance and mystification, producing a vivid, complicated portrait that is also a political parable.

More than anything else, and despite its focus on a small fry rather than a don, The Traitor suggests what Gotti might have looked like in assured—or maybe even just competent—hands.

Because of the complexity of the film’s story, its different time frames, and DeMille-size cast, Bellocchio furnishes explanatory titles and bulletins for the non-Italian viewer.

The idea of a gangster’s cognitive dissonance is a fascinating avenue to explore, yet Bellocchio favors a mostly straightforward true-crime story with handsome scale and scope. While the film briefly teases Tommaso’s internal contradictions, Bellocchio never meaningfully wrestles with the weight of their implications, which is problematic for a film fixated on the multifaceted nature of atonement.

The film is dynamically suspended between the pathos of rise and fall and the monotony of daily life, though punctually subdued and understated; it flows like a Homeric poem.

Marco Bellocchio, who turns eighty this fall, delivered his best film in years with The Traitor, an energetic chronicle of several decades’ worth of Cosa Nostra trials, as seen through the eyes of a mob boss turned informer, Tommaso Buscetta (an excellent Pierfrancesco Favino).

Despite using on-screen titles, copious exposition and occasionally library footage, Bellocchio and his three co-writers struggle to make clear the cobweb of power relations, especially as many figures introduced are immediately killed.

Bellocchio deftly narrates Buscetta’s journey of moral rectitude and personal vengeance by avoiding melodrama in favor of a muscular, straight-forward, style that cagily keeps the pentito's deeper beliefs or motivations off-screen.