The Mob threw a big party in high style in Palermo, 1980, in a grand venue overlooking the sea. Two families came together to celebrate their joint venture in one of the world’s most lucrative commodities, heroin. There was a band and dancing, torchbearers in Arabic headdress, a drum corps. The wives wore long gowns with children at their feet and the men raised glasses in a toast. A statue of their patron, St. Rosalia, looked on.
Tommaso Buscetta observes the scene with a twinge of melancholy. He’s the protagonist of The Traitor (Il traditore), Italian writer-director Marco Bellocchio’s masterful epic on the life of a real-life mafioso who turned state’s evidence in a country where no one knows anything and if they do, they don’t talk. With Buscetta’s testimony, the ancient code of silence cracked. Several hundred gangsters went to prison, some for multiple life terms.
Buscetta is played by Pierfrancesco Favino with the full force of believability. Buscetta probably wasn’t a man given to much reflection, and The Traitor respects his lack of introspection. “I am not an informant,” he tells the hawk-eyed Mafia-buster, Judge Falcone, after his extradition from Brazil. He repeats himself—and then, begins to inform. Since he’s shown enduring torture at the hands of Brazil’s military, and flashbacks reveal previous Italian prison sentences, fear of punishment isn’t the likely motivator. Instead, Buscetta seems genuinely disappointed by the direction taken by the Mafia, especially their increasing violence, their lack of any honor.
The Traitor visually dramatizes the media hype surrounding his “ratting out” (the screen fills with headlines in various fonts) and his courtroom testimony, whose scenes would be operatic if they weren’t such circuses. Evidently, defendants are allowed under Italian law to cross-examine each other. The presiding judge in the first trial tolerates catcalls and conduct unthinkable in American courts.
The bravery of Buscetta’s stand is displayed in the graffiti on the walls of Palermo, calling him “Traitor” and “Filth” and the demonstrators bearing banners reading “Long Live the Mafia that Gives Us Work.” When Falcone is assassinated, the patrons of a Palermo bar erupt in applause.
The Traitor opened on Feb. 28 at the Downer Theater.
