Mussolini's early life provides the grist for a major examination of the dictator in Marco Bellocchio's directed film. Mussolini had a wife and a son, both written out of the historical record and denied recognition. She was the fiery, erotic Ida Dalser, a woman Mussolini met in 1907 when he was a young socialist provocateur. Seven years later, they became lovers, and she sold her possessions to provide the financing for his paper “Il Popolo d'Italia”. In 1915, she bore him a son and the couple married. But within a very short time, she discovered to her shock that her husband had married another woman, Rachele Guidi. Henceforth, Ida was kept at a distance, eventually held under house arrest and finally thrown into an insane asylum. The film has been a revelation for Italians, not only confronting them with the image of the Duce – seen strutting in full- screen bravado – but also provoking comparisons, vigorously denied by Bellocchio, between Mussolini and Italy's current prime minister, Berlusconi. This is serious, intelligent filmmaking of the highest order. Piers Handling