1918 in Italy was, a title reminds us, “the year of victory.” Yet the first images in Gianni Amelio‘s WWI-set “Battleground” are anything but triumphal: a pile of bloodied soldiers’ bodies glinting wetly in the moonlight; a scavenger pilfering the wallets of the dead; a blanket thrown over a survivor whose gibbering shellshock makes him too abject to look at. The irony is heavy, the way everything in this stultifyingly serious drama is heavy: the skies, the mood, the movements of Luan Amelio Ujkaj’s stately-to-the-point-of-staid camera. The year may have ended in victory but for the Italian soldiers fighting on the frontlines, and for a civilian population numbed by
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