Piazza delle cinque luna, is an Italian political thriller, which takes a fictional approach to a real event. Focusing, upon the true story of the kidnapping and ultimate death of Italian political leader Aldo Moro, the film imagines a regional judge (played by Donald Sutherland) discovering clues that lead him to a vast conspiracy. Despite fast pacing, interesting (though strangle dubbed) acting , and brilliant cinematography the film fails to transpose itself to wider international stage.
Basically, unless you happen to know something about Italian politics of the 1970s, it is rather like (what I imagine) would be the experience of a Martian watching a fictional film about the assassination of JFK: one is baffled by a mass of evidence in amazing detail- from info about the type bullets, to who kept the sink running in adjacent apartment. (All of which, incidentally, characters apparently pull out of their underpants in the form of files with surreal amounts of information.) Yet, unless one knows enough about the actual history to sort fact from fiction (or to be deeply interested in the tragedy which inspired the story), it strikes one as incompressible jumble of strange and irrelevant facts.
I would only recommend it to a person teaching a course in Italian politics, or who was willing to do some advance googling on the subject, and then I would warn this person that the over all plot is very predictable and the political conspiracy naive. This is too bad because the cinematography and the overall concept are both excellent.
The only reason I rated it as high as I did, is because I appreciate the feeling of dreamlike alienation it caused, but this is clearly not for everyone.
