The Commander review – true story of patriotic heroism tries to avoid being political football

Here is a stolid second world war drama, directed by Edoardo de Angelis, taken from a patriotic true story of non-fascist Italian decency during the Battle of the Atlantic; it was made with the cooperation of the Italian navy and promoted to the status of opening gala at last year’s Venice film festival when Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers was withdrawn due to the writers’ strike.

Pierfrancesco Favino plays submarine commander Salvatore Todaro whose forthright courage, combined with a certain poetic sensitivity, inspires fervent loyalty from his men. He is also in continuous agony from a back injury which we see being treated at the film’s beginning; negligent doctors put him into a crude corset, telling him: “Fascism is pain.” (Perhaps so – but pain for other people, surely?)

Todaro is forced to sink a (neutral) Belgian ship which had fired on him first, and which was carrying machine parts for the British enemy (his men are using the famous photo of Churchill wielding a gangster-type Tommy gun as a dartboard); he takes pity on the survivors in their leaky lifeboat and makes the bold decision to take these men on board and ferry them to a safe harbour. He shares with them his own men’s desperately meagre rations and cramped quarters – and tells the Belgian commander that some will have to sleep in the conning tower which will fatally flood when he next has to dive, and the Belgians will have to decide among themselves which of them this will be. Inevitably, there are mutterings among the Belgians about the “fascists” and ungrateful sabotage and mutiny breaks out.

It’s an absorbing story in its way, told in a forthright, un-complex, undemanding manner: it is less troubled than Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot and is perhaps closer to the Jack Hawkins naval drama The Cruel Sea. Favino also brings to the movie his own potent, unselfconscious masculinity. As to whether this is a whitewashing of Italy’s fascist past, to some degree of course it is; the movie effectively cherrypicks a moment of selfless heroism and finds an Italian military man who disobeyed standing orders from the fascists in command and in fact helped the enemy – or, at all events, an Allied co-belligerent.

There are however some very peculiar, eroticised scenes of Todaro’s home life, perhaps to emphasise that being cooped up in a sub with all these sweaty, frustrated men is not leading to anything untoward; his wife is shown playing Cavalleria Rusticana on the piano in a state of semi-undress while their baby sleeps in a crib. It’s very much Favino’s movie.

• The Commander is in UK cinemas from 6 December and on digital platforms from 23 December