Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca)

 

Director Marco Bellocchio, 1965

FISTS IN THE POCKET (I pugni in tasca)               A                                                                 aka:  Fist in His Pocket                                                                                                            Italy  (108 mi)  1965  d: Marco Bellocchio

The great advantage of first films is that you're nobody and you have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything, you have nothing to lose. My name may remain linked to this film above all. The anger that turns into the murder of a mother and a brother was very much in sync with the times and with the things that were exploding and about to explode. The film is actually about the nihilistic fervor of a youth, while the early phase of the post-'68 movement, the one I liked, was libertarian: empowering the imagination, the non-violent challenging of fathers and professors, and so on. Then things changed.

—Marco Bellocchio, Film Comment, January/February 2005

Bellocchio started his career with a middle finger to the status quo, a film so combustible that it has overshadowed the rest of his career.  Detailing the toxic pathology within a languishing bourgeois household, utilizing the techniques of the French New Wave, this film was quite a shock to audiences when it was released, some calling for it to be banned, viewing it as blasphemous, savagely perverse, subversive, or even nihilist, yet the shock it provokes feels like a premonition of unrest, a foreshadowing of the turbulent times of the late 60’s, when leftist politics and revolutionary dreams brought mass demonstrations into the mainstream.  While that may be true, there is also a sentiment that this captures the lingering effects of postwar fascism, with the film representing a rejection of the new normal in Italy, namely the existing complacency, with Bellocchio skewering the institutions of family, marriage, and Catholicism, the very foundations of Italian culture and the mainstays of Italian neorealist cinema.  Rather than present a traditional drama in the neorealist style, he forces viewers to confront a new kind of Italian reality, delving into psychological minefields.  In Italy, as opposed to France or the United States, the 1968 student protests continued on and off for a decade, lingering much longer, as if coming to terms with establishing a new identity.  A remarkably strident film that interestingly bears similarities with Bellocchio’s more recent Vincere (2009), which is a damning exposé on fascism and the hypocrisy shown by Italian strongman Benito Mussolini towards his neglected first wife, locking her and their mutual son in a mental hospital after his rise to power, disavowing all knowledge of their existence.  Forty years apart, both remain Bellocchio’s best efforts, largely due to the starkly unique subject matter and the extraordinary way the director allows each story to unravel.  This is a chamber drama of family dysfunction that could easily be seen as a metaphor for the dysfunction of a paralyzed fascist nation, but takes no steps to develop any political dimension, confining the material to the unusual characters who inhabit this story that at times resembles a bizarre coming of age drama, a bleak satire on the moral hypocrisy of Catholicism and the Italian middle class, and a gothic horror story.  Much like French director Bruno Dumont who shot his first movies in his home town of Bailleul, Bellocchio shoots this film in his home town of Bobbio, a small town in the northern province of Piacenza, actually using his family’s villa where he grew up as the family home in the film, where there are no neighbors or buildings in view, just a deck with an extraordinary view of the distant mountains.  The remote isolation of the home plays a major part of the story, as the family feels cut off from the city and the world around them, confined to a morose life of boredom and despair.  

Perhaps a predecessor to Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the unhinged family member is Alessandro (Swedish actor Lou Castel as Sandro), a psychotic, self-centered brooder with nothing to do but spend his days bragging openly about his love for his sister and his violent schemes to murder his own family members, to put them out of their misery, who is himself plagued by severe epileptic seizures, popping pills to help alleviate the regularity, who is joined at the hip with his inseparable, near incestuous sister, the drop dead gorgeous Giulia (Paola Pitagora), an aggressively compulsive sexual narcissist who is perfectly willing to plot behind the scenes with her brother.  Only the mother (Liliana Grace), who is blind and can’t see the family cat eating out of her bowl of soup, or the somewhat successful older brother Augusto (Marino Masé), who spends much of his time in town with successful business interests and a girlfriend Lucia (Jeannie McNeil), have anything resembling a normal life.  The youngest, and most ignored, is the barely tolerated, developmentally disabled Leone (Pierluigi Troglio), also plagued by epilepsy, which can be unpredictable and life-threatening.  Both Sandro and Giulia know they are different and don’t fit in, spending plenty of time eyeing themselves in the mirror, outcasts confined to their claustrophobic, prison-like villa outside of town filled with antiques and family portraits on the walls, away from public scrutiny and outside the reach of any existing morality.  Neither feels close to anyone else, and it’s this sense of severe disconnection leading to amoral depravity that pervades every aspect of this film.  Giulia anonymously writes threatening letters to Lucia suggesting there is a pregnant other woman, using letters cut out from magazines like a ransom demand, contending Augusto is merely toying with her affections, while at the same time encouraging and seemingly indulging the incestuous lust of Sandro, who tapes a photo of a young Marlon Brando to her bedpost and writes her love poetry, which, of course, she eagerly shows to Augusto.  Evoking Luis Buñuel’s sense of the violence in upper middle class stagnation and the brutality of elitism, Buñuel was a director revered by Bellocchio, but he publicly dismissed the film, finding it repulsive and disrespectful, condemning it as an exercise in bad taste.  Coming on the heels of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (1964), both directors broke onto the scene with early films in the 60’s that are extraordinary anti-conformist manifestos that are among the most stunning directorial debuts in movie history, completely altering the landscape of Italian cinema.

Bellocchio outlines the premise, “In Italy, the family is an almost holy institution, a pillar of society, and to criticize it is considered outrageous.”  Castel is extraordinary as a childishly neurotic loose cannon whose constant mood changes become reflective of his demented personality, afflicted with tics and other strange behaviors, where his oddness becomes acceptable behavior within his psychologically repressive family, as that’s what they’re accustomed to seeing, like inventing hideously violent newspaper headlines when reading the paper for his mother, Lou Castel in Fists in the Pocket YouTube (2:47), or his bizarre desire to raise chinchillas, which he quickly forgets, so to them he never stands out as being anything other than peculiar, where his vain acts of selfishness are to be expected.  However it’s his slow descent into madness that sets the tone for the film, as he begins to believe that the practical solution to the family’s problems is to first kill off his mother and then a disabled brother.  Augusto appears to have his faculties intact, where the entire family invests its hopes in him as the sole breadwinner, leaving the others feeling excruciating resentment at being left out, yet he does nothing to stop Sandro from carrying out his murderous intentions, refusing to get involved, becoming silently complicit, yet there’s a wonderful scene illuminated only by car headlights where we see Augusto avidly shooting at scurrying rats.  A scathing indictment of the privileged class, Bellocchio uses quick cuts to demonstrate an anxious state of mind, where Alberto Marrama’s crisp black and white cinematography, by contrast, feels energetically liberated, reflected by his constantly moving camerawork along with the jarring operatic score by Ennio Morricone, creating a disturbingly harsh, unsettling atmosphere reminiscent of horror films.  When Sandro takes his blind mother out for a drive, stopping to get some air as he pushes her off the side of a cliff, the previous slow buildup of meticulous character development takes a sudden turn with a huge emotional payoff, as his mind deteriorates further with Sandro’s brazenly disrespectful behavior, literally dancing over his mother’s coffin.  Sandro and Giulia, are nothing less than giddy when throwing out their mother’s belongings and setting them ablaze, as if she were a dreadful burden they are more than happy to be rid of.  It’s as if the dark, disturbing tone of the film has been suddenly rewired for murder. 

The fatherless family may be an allegorical reference to Italy without Mussolini, where time and time again, Bellocchio stages scenes in front of family portraits, with the past continuously looming over the children, reminding them of a dutiful connection to a helpless mother, but it’s a connection that leads to chaos.  Despite Sandro’s matricide, which he shares with his sister, life goes on exactly as before, where keeping a family secret is a normal part of their lives, as they kept their obvious disgust for their mother to themselves.  Augusto even attempts to reach out to his brother, inviting him to a party of Lucia’s friends in the city, but Sandro remains isolated and alone, even in the company of others, including a persistent woman that asks him to dance with her.  But Sandro resists change, knowing he is a hindrance to his brother’s chances to actually get out of that dreary house, becoming nothing more than a weight to the world, even sleeping with the same prostitute that his brother frequents to incessantly question her about him.  Bellocchio beautifully stages the aftermath of murder in a silent, seething rage, where the psychological presence of death remains in the forefront of both Sandro and Giulia’s thoughts, like a stench in the air they breathe, something they can’t get rid of, with both becoming consumed by the toxic fumes.  The entire fiasco is perhaps best expressed by Leone, who at one point presciently acknowledges, “What torture, living in this house.”  There’s an anxious uneasiness to the restless energy onscreen, personified both by the sociopathic behavior of Castel and the film’s own aesthetic, accentuated by handheld shots, assertively fluid camera movements, and jaw-dropping cuts loaded with ambiguity, as we’re never sure if we’re watching a tragedy or a black comedy.  Exuding in next-level family dysfunction, perhaps the words of the director twenty years later in 1989 offer a clue, “Madness is a form of rebellion, a cry of freedom.”  What’s perhaps most startling is how banal and ordinary Sandro seems, a man with no special qualities, nothing to gain, and no real motive, so his murderous descent seems driven by boredom and indifference, gorgeously realized in the final operatic scene staged to Maria Callas singing Sempre Libera from Verdi’s La Traviata, Maria Callas - "Sempre Libera!" W. Alfredo Kraus (High C ... YouTube (4:51), a fierce, narcissistic anthem to freedom and happiness, where the soaring soprano voice sets the stage for the electrifying finale, a feverish plea for individuality that becomes a Macbethian portrait of terror.    

Free and aimless I frolic
From joy to joy,
Flowing along the surface
of life’s path as I please.
As the day is born,
Or as the day dies,
Happily I turn to the new delights
That make my spirit soar.

Love is a heartbeat throughout the universe,
mysterious, altering,
the torment and delight of my heart.

Oh! Oh! Love!
Madness! Euphoria!

—Sempre Libera, (Always Free) by Giuseppe Verdi from La Traviata, Act I finale, 1853

Nuts in May - made for TV

 

Director Mike Leigh

Leigh with Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman

NUTS IN MAY – made for TV                    B+                                                                           Great Britain  (81 mi)  1976  d: Mike Leigh        episode of BBC “Play for Today”

You’re breaking the laws of the campsite and the laws of the country code.                                —Keith Pratt (Roger Sloman)

Basically the template for Ben Wheatley’s hilariously dark road trip spiraling out of control in Sightseers (2012), as after making his film debut with Bleak Moments (1971), Leigh took a 17-year hiatus from feature filmmaking and instead worked exclusively for British television filming his own plays, mostly for the BBC English Regions Drama department (ERD) when it was led by the renowned producer, David Rose, during what is often described as the ‘golden age’ of British television.  Having studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London during the early 1960’s, his interest in writing and directing led him to switch schools several times, ultimately graduating from the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School) in 1965.  About that time he began developing a method for creating narratives that relied upon extensive rehearsals and actors’ improvisations to manufacture characters and conflict in an organic manner, where instead of focusing on a traditional storyline, his films rely intensely on characters, explored with as much detail as possible, which would become a signature feature of Leigh’s working method for the rest of his career, Mike Leigh Arena Making Plays The Life And Work Of Mike ... YouTube (1:20:44).  This is almost certainly the best known of the low-budget, BBC Pebble Mill’s Plays for Today, along with Abigail’s Party (1977), a taped version of the pre-existing stage production, where the subtlety and uniqueness of these films have long been overlooked, seemingly made on a shoestring budget, small in scale, dealing with daily domestic life and relationships, yet never given the same critical attention as his features, though some of Britain’s best directors made a significant portion of their films for television, most shot very quickly on 16mm, which would include Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Peter Greenaway, Alan Clarke, and Richard Eyre.  Mike Leigh’s first television drama for ERD was a half-hour studio piece called Permissive Society in 1975, which led to this film, both notable for having no musical score.  At first, a lot of BBC staff were rather dubious of Mike Leigh’s improvisatory way of working, with the crew suggesting there’s a guy down there in the studio and they’re making it up as they go along, but what they were missing is Leigh’s careful observation of the actors interacting as the characters and developing storylines from those interactions.  David Rose originated from Dorset and wanted to depict the region, offering a sense of place, reflecting the life and culture outside of London. There seemed to be few writers from the South West and therefore Leigh was invited to make a film set around the Isle of Purbeck.  Focusing on the suburban south, Leigh’s ability to create chillingly convincing middle-class monsters emerges here, and while this is the lighter side of Mike Leigh, it has darker implications, filled with wicked humor, funny and painful at the same time, featuring characters who are hilariously unlikeable, offering observations on class and society in a more humorously imaginative yet still coherent and meaningful way, perhaps the only straightforward comedy Leigh has ever made, arguably the definitive work about the British camping holiday, where a pleasant journey into the countryside seeking a quiet refuge from the noise and industrial pollution in London produces catastrophic results.  As he has often insisted, there is no “them” in Leigh’s work, where we are always meant to see ourselves in every calamity, as Hell is never reserved for other people, yet tolerating them may feel like it.

With the great outdoors beckoning, this film captures the Back-to-the-land movement of the 1970’s as a backdrop, with substantial numbers of people migrating from cities to rural areas, associated with hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog, and Mother Earth News in the USA, while in the UK it was rooted in a desire for self-sufficiency and reconnecting with nature with an increased ecological awareness, encompassing various aspects, including organic farming, homesteading, and a search for a simpler life, where it was viewed as a countercultural response to the perceived ills of modern urban life and industrial society.  This film reminds us that 1970’s television was much more progressive and thought provoking, more welcoming to unorthodox ideas, freed from objectionable restrictions, allowing greater experimentation, and was actually a breeding ground for budding artists.  Ordinary lives are given dimension and complexity here because Leigh has a gift for using the close-up, speech patterns, and the silence of his characters to explore under the surface in order to capture the essence of who they are.  Like Ken Loach, an avowed socialist, both are independent filmmakers known for portraying the working class experience, yet Leigh’s films often have a comic and satiric edge, not as overtly political as Loach, accentuating the personal, creating a world too ambiguous and rife with contradictions to offer political alternatives or easy answers, focusing instead on a depiction of dramatic interactions and behavior, more intent on raising questions and possibilities rather than offering any political or social solutions.  While extending his deepest sympathies for his working class characters, many behave badly, victimize themselves, and live pathetic, constricted lives.  In a Mike Leigh film nothing comes easy, as his characters’ flaws never disappear, continuing to grate on the nerves of the audience, where this film follows the path of liberal do-gooders who narrow-mindedly flaunt their moral superiority, immersed in a fantasized Walden utopia that turns their social consciousness on its ear in this blistering satire of British middle class attitudes and manners, becoming a study of class antagonism and the insecurities of masculinity.  The young married couple at the center of this drama are Alison Steadman (married at the time to the director, also in Abigail’s Party) and Roger Sloman as Candice Marie and Keith Pratt, a maddeningly self-righteous and opinionated couple from Croydon going car-camping in the English countryside, where one thing that’s undeniably clear is that the characters are etched so vividly that they lived on in the memories of the audience for many years afterwards, so they really stand out.   Candice Marie, who works in a toy store, is that shy and submissive, artsy type who spends her time drawing, painting, or collecting shells from the shoreline of the Jurassic Coast, while also composing inane songs that sound more like goofy jingles, always playing second fiddle to her obsessional, anal retentive husband Keith, a patronizing, pompous, and domineering control freak who always treats her like a child and is what we commonly call a know-it-all, having organized their 10-day journey with great precision, refusing to budge from the itinerary, where his reasoning is “What’s the point of having a schedule if you don’t stick to it?”  Inexplicably, his reading material at bedtime is The Guinness Book of Records.   

Listed at #63 from Time Out’s list of Best British Movies | 100 Best British Films of All Time, the drama is generated simply by being who they are as opposed to arising out of actions, where Keith is a doofus, yet the interest lies not in anything he does in any given moment, but who he remains throughout, a mirror image of the snobbish and deeply repressed John Cleese in Fawlty Towers or Monty Python skits with its devastatingly awkward humor.  The first thing that stands out is their car, which they have packed to the gills, a 1961 Morris Minor 1000 convertible, known for its iconic design and “Englishness.”  Right from the outset there is drama in how they interact with each other, as we see them traipsing around Corfe Castle with its numbered landmark spots along the way, where we see them absurdly arguing over who should hold the castle’s guidebook, with Keith refusing to relinquish control, always rushing ahead, leaving Candice Marie behind as she struggles to keep up, totally dependent upon whatever information he’s willing to share, usually shouted from a distance, so immediately we’re aware of the imbalance of power.  While they’re folk-singing vegetarian types, the kind who lecture other people on the evils of eating meat, also non-smokers, but the kind who enjoy describing tar-caked lungs to anyone they see smoking, with Keith swearing that food needs to be chewed 72 times before swallowing, as if that’s a proven scientific fact, while also jotting down every expenditure in his ledger, their vacation idyll is interrupted by another vacationer, Ray (Anthony O’Donnell), who has set up his tent right next to theirs, blaring the transistor radio, even though he’s not really listening to it.  When they ask him to turn it off, he simply refuses, leaving Keith fuming, as if betrayed by the commoners, so they move their tent farther away.  On an excursion to Stair Hole and Durdle Door, a famous natural limestone arch that can be seen standing erect along the coastline, they end up getting drenched by the rain, stopping their car for a pedestrian who turns out to be Ray, with Candice Marie taking a friendly interest while Keith simply refuses to speak to him.  Her attempts to be social infuriate Keith, whose dogmatic obstinance is nothing less than jealous outrage, so when she invites him over afterwards for a cup of tea, Keith bullies him into joining them for a singalong, which couldn’t be more absurdly irritating, where that tortured expression on Ray’s hapless face is priceless, Zoo Song - Nuts in May[Mike Leigh] YouTube (3:30).  Disinterest is something that Keith clearly doesn’t notice or care about.  When an even noisier couple from the Midlands arrives on their motorbike, Finger (Stephen Bill) and Honky (Sheila Kelley), chaotically sharing the same space, refusing to go to bed quietly, with alcohol flowing freely leading to loud, boisterous sexual activity, Keith simply loses it.  Flouting the “country code,” he attempts to make a citizen’s arrest the next day when they have the unmitigated gall to build a fire, which is forbidden, of course, as tempers flare, where his embarrassing frustration boils over into Monty Pythonesque hysteria, quickly becoming the butt of their jokes, which only pisses him off even more, causing them to leave altogether, completely fed up with all these horrible people, yet in reality they cannot escape the horror of other people, which may as well be a prescient metaphor for Brexit.  Nothing earthshaking happens here, where Americans are often perplexed by a cinema in which nothing seems to happen, though Leigh’s drama of transformation is rooted in the layered rehearsal of interpersonal dynamics observed with the patience of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, but it’s impossible to forget just how easily the characters continually get under our skin, making this a small gem of a movie that continues to impress even after all these years.  Rare and hard to find, but well worth the effort.    

Nuts In May (1976) : Mike Leigh  YouTube (1:20:58)

Nuts In May (1976) with commentary by Mike Leigh  YouTube (1:20:58)