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

Blue Spring (Aoi haru)

 

Director Toshiaki Toyoda

BLUE SPRING (Aoi haru)      B                                                                                                    Japan  (83 mi)  2001  d: Toshiaki Toyoda

No regrets for my youth.                                                                                                                 —Kimura (Yûsuke Ohshiba)

An often overlooked, heavily stylized movie about the disillusioned youth-gone-wild high school experience from those already on the edge, who don’t know where they’re going or have any idea where they’ll end up, as they don’t really want to be there, who are so distanced and alienated that they may as well not exist, so they invent violent games to play to force their lives to matter, turning into a nihilistic punk movie with a homoerotic and even gay subtext that is only inferred, never explicitly shown, more metaphoric than real, as it reveals the essence of the horrors of the high school experience through a grotesque and often brutally exaggerated portrayal.  Toyoda was a child chess prodigy as an adolescent before changing his interest to cinema, working as a scriptwriter and assistant director on Sakamoto Junji’s CHECKMATE (1991) and BIRIKEN (1996) before launching his own career, where this is his third film.  An unorthodox director who likes to do things his own way, featuring a strong grunge/punk rock aesthetic and a willingness to be different, Toyoda has established himself as one of the more interesting contemporary Japanese directors, but not really known outside of Japan.  Never mentioned in the same breath as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, or Takashi Miike, more familiar Japanese directors whose films have reached an international audience, Toyoda’s reputation suffered setbacks from two well publicized scandals, as he was arrested for drug possession in 2005, while in 2019 he was arrested again when a police raid uncovered an illegal antique firearm from WWII that he inherited from his grandmother, falsely as it turns out, as the firearm was no longer working, but he was shunned by the Japanese film industry afterwards, with both events becoming the subject of sensational tabloid coverage in Japan.  Often viewed as a cult director, he has an unorthodox, stylized aesthetic that includes youth crime movies, meditative dramas, documentaries, and low-budget art films, whose work is consistently introspective, vibrant, and brutal, but this early film, born in anger, touching a raw nerve, is his most scathing reflection of real-world anxieties in the economic downturn of Japan in the mid-90’s, when an economy that was the envy of the world went into a tailspin, moving from one of the fastest-growing countries in the world to one of the slowest, dismantling the job-for-life system that its corporations had previously offered, literally ripping the futures away from these disaffected kids.  Japan experienced an increase in school violence during the 80’s and 90’s, where some disturbing attacks from teenagers made big headlines and shocked the nation, like the Murder of Junko Furuta.  First and foremost is the rebellious music, [Engsub] DROP - THEE MICHELLE GUN ELEPHANT 「Blue ... YouTube (6:44), an assaultive force of teen angst that lingers in the imagination, evoking the raw and unpolished spirit of youth, often combined with a free-flowing, slow motion aesthetic from cinematographer Norimichi Kasamatsu, who also shot Junji’s BIRIKEN (1996), less plot-driven, more interested in atmosphere, abstractions, ambiguity, and the chaotic nature of the character interaction, with very limited locations, providing an honest look at the hidden anger and rage of teenage emotions, reaching the depths of the darkest realms.

Coming at a time when the adolescent high school genre already appeared passé, having been graced with a slew of films that touched upon familiar themes of alienated youth, like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), Francis Ford Coppola’s RUMBLE FISH (1983) and THE OUTSIDERS (1983), John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985) and Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986), John Waters’ HAIRSPRAY (1988), Michael Lehman’s Heathers (1988), Allan Moyle’s PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990), Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998), Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål) (1998), Alexander Payne’s Election (1999), Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), and Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001).  Based on Taiyô Matsumoto’s manga of the same title in 1993, a collection of seven different stories, this was the break-through film for both Toyoda and actor Ryuhei Matsuda, who is the undisputed star of this film, appearing earlier as the passive, overly effeminate samurai in Nagisa Ôshima’s GOHATTO (1999).  He is the enigmatic figure at the center of this teen drama that looks like it’s taking place in a post-apocalyptic war zone, as this cement bunker of a building is a run-down high school for boys that looks more like a prison, as the dark and grungy hallways are nearly always deserted, accentuated by heavy doses of graffiti on the walls that proclaim gang turf, where there’s an astonishing absence of school authority, while the outside world barely intrudes upon its secluded existence, making this a very unique portrayal, uncomfortable at times yet oddly compelling.  An aimlessness seems to define the psychological mindset of these wayward teens, which includes Kujo (Matsuda Ryuhei) his loyal childhood friend Aoki (Hirofumi Arai) who idolizes him, surrounded by a host of others, Yukio (Sousuke Takaoka), Yoshimura (Shûgo Oshinari), Kimura (Yûsuke Ohshiba), a disenchanted figure who dreams of playing on the Nationals baseball team, and Ota (Yûta Yamazaki), who seem to follow their every lead.  All dressed in the same dark school uniform, mostly they wander the hallways and bathrooms as a free-ranging gang terrorizing fellow students with impunity, going on rampages inflicting sadistic cruelty at every turn, where their lives hold little meaning, lost to a neverending world of inflicted misery, having been written off by the school long ago as lost causes.  Anyone coming from a shitty high school can relate to this, where the mantra may as well be, “Hatred hurts, but an abundance of hatred hurts the most,” leading to a regretful world of apathy and indifference.  Never once do we see any parents, while the teachers or school counselors are completely ignored, with students wandering in and out of class at will, instead this is about the social fabric of this underground group that seems to exist on its own terms, unfettered by the rules of society or the school, yet their own hierarchy is completely ineffectual, consumed by a deep-seeded sense of powerlessness in a crumbling social system, exposing a painfully rich subtext of raw, desperate emotion struggling to break through the surface.

Rebellion is the key ingredient to this film, THEE MICHELLE GUN ELEPHANT - Akage No Kelly (赤毛の ... YouTube (5:45), but rebellion against what is the question in this dilapidated school in the suburban outskirts of Tokyo that seems to have no established authority, so they seem to exist in a vacuum, with no future and no past, portraying the loneliness and isolation inside the minds of a hopeless yet excessively violent youth.  As if to amuse themselves from the boredom, they invent a rooftop game that is a test of courage, yet also plays into suicidal tendencies, as they stand on the outer railing of the roof with nothing beneath them but ground below, holding on by their hands as numbers are called out in succession.  They clap their hands to the same number being called out before latching back onto the rails, each one growing successively more dangerous, as they could easily plunge to their deaths.  It’s a modern day version of the game of chicken depicted in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), where they drive cars off the edge of a cliff, and the last to jump out is the winner.  Whoever wins the game is declared the leader of the group, which rules all the gangs in the high school.  When Kujo wins the leadership role, Aoki is excited, but he wants his friend to exact violence and revenge to wipe out their enemies.  Kujo, however, has no interest in doing this, finding his position meaningless, as he never wanted the leadership position, where his air of aloofness is stunning, bored by the violence and hatred that surrounds him, apparently ruling by disinterest, explaining to a strangely sympathetic teacher, “People who know what they want scare me.”  Aoki soon tires of his secondary role, as Kujo hardly pays any attention to him anymore, spiraling into a void, losing interest in everything, so he starts pummeling kids on his own to assert his dominance.  In their last year of high school, most kids are preparing for their future, but in this film they have no future, where the only thing that awaits their dead-end path is a place in the hierarchy of the yakuza, a criminal underworld enterprise who recruit directly from the high school ranks, which are little more than a training ground for organized crime, Blue Spring (2001) - best scene YouTube (3:03).  Aoki transforms himself into an entirely new look, embarking on a campaign of terror hoping to impress Kujo, but he’s devastated when he instead ignores him and couldn’t care less.  As Aoki becomes disillusioned, alienated, and even hostile toward Kujo, who has no interest in the violence of the yakuza lifestyle, friends around them slowly disappear, as whatever friendships or allegiances that once existed seem to have faded away, like a dried up flower.  The nonchalance of Kujo and the bleakness of school life are contrasted with the bright, colorful appearance of cherry blossoms in bloom, which are seen everywhere around the school, offering a luxurious glimpse of beauty, with suggestions that more lies beyond what we see onscreen, which includes Kujo, who grows increasingly philosophical, even taking an interest in the flower gardens run by a diminutive teacher (Mame Yamada) who urges him to tend to flowers in bloom, a clear metaphor for adolescence.  An impressively stylish time-lapse sequence leads to a stunning finale exhibiting a kind of reckless impulsiveness, Blue Spring (青い春, Aoi haru) 2002 YouTube (6:37), where you literally stare into the eye of fatalistic gloom, and all that’s left is a harrowing sense of unending despair.