The Mattei Affair

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Francesco Rosi
7:00 The Mattei Affair
Francesco Rosi (Italy, 1972)

(Il caso Mattei). “Oil makes governments fall, creates revolutions, and determines world balance,” declares the doomed protagonist of Rosi’s crackling political thriller on Italy’s legendary postwar energy czar Enrico Mattei, whose attempts to revolutionize world oil control may (or may not) have led to his death in a mysterious 1962 plane crash. “The most powerful Italian since Caesar,” Mattei railed against American and Western European oil monopolies, created alliances with Third World nations (“Mao is right,” he said), and brought Italy a measure of economic self-control through his own oil deals. “In a few words, he could upset the world balance, something the war couldn’t even accomplish,” notes one reporter in Rosi’s incendiary, fractured, and seething fictionalized account, a Citizen Kane of the Enron world brought to life through an extraordinary performance by Gian-Maria Volonte as a man consumed—and possibly destroyed—by power. Co-winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, The Mattei Affair, and its take on big oil, capitalism, and global economics, is as reveletory now as it was in 1972.—Jason Sanders
• Written by Rosi, Tonino Guerra. Photographed by Pasqualino De Santis. With Gian Maria Volonté, Luigi Squarzina, Peter Baldwin, Edda Ferronao. (118 mins, In Italian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Cinecittà Luce S.p.A.)

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