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Don’t let yourself be drawn in by Mussolini; he appears only in propagandistic news footage about halfway through the film, which I consider to be an imaginative way of handling his transformation from a man belonging to one woman (okay, a few women) into a man belonging to a whole nation. We no longer see how Ida Dalser subjectively perceived Il Duce, but how film cameras “objectively” captured him. Nevertheless, the narrative remains highly subjective, fluctuating a bit between fantasy and reality. Several powerful moments (the collage marked by futurism, watching Chaplin’s The Kid) are offset by several moments that are too obviously supposed to be powerful (the long and impressive but somewhat needless demonstration of how to shed tears in close-up). Towards the end, when Bellocchio is mainly trying to finish telling a touching story and uses fewer shots that could be exhibited in a gallery, the film becomes unpleasantly mediocre and ends a good twenty minutes later than would have been appropriate. It’s a shame that the content isn't as unconventional as the form...but when you’re dealing with history, it’s hard to just make stuff up. 75% (16/05/2011)

Above all, it's a formally interesting film that may get you by how it's shot more than by what's depicted in it. Benito Mussolini is certainly not an uninteresting subject, but this is not a film that is primarily about him. It's about what power can do, how it can change you, and how it can destroy others and throw them into a role they didn't want or expect. (19/06/2017)

In my opinion, the film is not primarily an attempt to depict the obscure love of a woman and a dictator. For that, the psychology of the characters would be too simple and unchanging from one moment on. Therefore, we should rather understand the film as a more general critique of fascism/Mussolini, in which the film form plays a crucial role with the use of alienating effects in the form of period materials. Furthermore, while up until the turning point Mussolini (F. Timi) appears on screen as himself and can be perceived as a human character (with all his flaws), from the moment of the turning point, he presents himself as a perfect duce through period footage. From that moment on, the internal imperfection = inherent self-destruction of fascism also manifests itself, as it tries to destroy the people who are: 1) the duce's biggest supporters - Ida, who will never stop loving Mussolini and thus will never leave the psychiatric clinic, 2) the duce himself - accomplished by destroying his own namesake son, who in the end transforms into his own father (and is therefore also locked up in a psychiatric clinic), symbolized on the film plane by assigning the role of the son to the actor who played Mussolini's father in the first half. In other words, the more perfect the image of the duce in front of the public, the greater the decline of the real duce (or his "alter ego" in the form of his son and devoted love). The criticism of the role of the Catholic Church is also very subtle: there were many compassionate individuals within it, but it is the church as a whole that actually keeps Ida captive to fascist tyranny throughout the film. (26/03/2014)