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

Vermiglio

 

Writer/director Maura Delpero

Delpero with the Silver Lion at Venice

The director on the set

VERMIGLIO                         B                                                                                               Italy  France  Belgium  (119 mi)  2024  d: Maura Delpero

My father left us one summer afternoon. Before closing them forever, he looked at us with the big, amazed eyes of a child. I had already heard that when you get older you become a little child again, but I didn’t know that those two ages could merge into a single face. In the months that followed, he came to visit me in a dream. He had returned to his childhood home, in Vermiglio. He was six years old and had a toothless smile and the legs of a mountain goat and was carrying this film under his arm: four seasons in the life of his large family. A story of children and adults, amongst deaths and births, disappointments and rebirths, of their holding each other tight in the turns of life, and out of a community growing into individuals. Of the smell of wood and warm milk on freezing mornings. With the distant and ever-present war, experienced by those who remained outside the great machine: the mothers who watched the world from a kitchen, with newborns dying because of blankets that were too short, the women who feared they were already widows, the farmers who waited for children who never returned, the teachers and priests who replaced the fathers. A story of war without bombs, or great battles. In the uncompromising logic of the mountain that every day reminds man how small he is. 

Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a “family saying” that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small village. Travelling through a personal time, it wants to pay homage to a collective memory.

—Maura Delpero, Director’s Statement, VERMIGLIO

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, while also winning the Best Film in the feature film competition at the Chicago Film Festival (Festival Award Winners - Cinema Chicago), and even shortlisted for the Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, but failed to make the final cut, so this film is critically acclaimed, but sluggishly paced and only mildly engaging, where it feels overly drawn out, with a novelesque sweep of too many characters that can be challenging, yet the remote location in the Italian Alps is breathtaking.  Written, directed, and produced by Maura Delpero, an Italian director who studied literature both in Italy and France before shifting gears to study film at the Professional Training Center of SICA in Buenos Aires, making several documentaries before releasing her first feature, MATERNAL (2019), inspired by her own experiences as a teacher in Argentina.  This is another intensely personal project, creating a family portrait inspired by her own experiences, yet enlarged, becoming a collective memory movie.  Not nearly as successful as Sarah Polley’s collective voices drama, 2023 Top Ten List #1 Women Talking, which utilizes a similar technique, but Polley’s characters are more fully formed, each one readily identified by viewers, creating substantially greater dramatic impact that this more subdued film lacks.  Part of it is the source material, as Polley drew from a novel by Miriam Toews that features almost exclusively women, described by the novelist as “an imagined response to real events,” where their agenda is clearly recognizable and heartfelt.  This feels more muddled, rather dark and pessimistic, harder to follow, where not much actually happens, as it’s more of a quietly subtle, observational movie, almost like a documentary, inspired by a love for the cinematic poetry of Ermanno Olmi (more in spirit than his directorial style), whose looming presence permeates throughout, capturing the experience of work and family, where his films are full of life and dignity, drawing inspiration from his Catholic faith, and can be viewed as simplicity itself, expressed through humor and grace.  Perhaps a throwback to Luchino Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), or even Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), with children prominently in the foreground, also reminiscent of Thomas Hardy novels and their film adaptations, like Michael Winterbottom’s JUDE (1996) or Thomas Vinterberg’s Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), this historical drama is set in a remote location in the mountains with just a few hundred inhabitants near the end of WWII in 1944.  Shot in the Italian neorealist mode with a mostly non-professional cast, the cinematography is a canvas of still life, with a predilection for fixed shots, providing not only insight into the everyday routine, but a static lens observing the tension between tradition and change, between the natural cycle of the changing seasons, and the transformations imposed by the war, filled with quiet moments, disappointments, and the everlasting bonds of family.  Without a trace of sentimentality, there is room for pauses and silences, which become as eloquent as the dialogues, as traces of war linger long after the war ended, upending the social fabric, leading to unemployment and poverty, affecting a significant part of society, which led to the birth of Italian neorealism.  Outside of food shortages and conversational references, along with occasional planes flying overhead, there are no war references, no battles, no bombs exploding, and no graphic violence, as this could be happening at any point in history and the village would function primarily the same, giving the film a timelessness that goes beyond the borders, as it’s more of a time capsule of the living, characterized by long takes and sparse dialogue, where the pace is slow and deliberate, the drama understated, and the silences can feel oppressive.            

Certainly not lacking in ambition, as this film stakes out its claim into largely untold territory, effectively highlighting how many ingrained prejudices and injustices toward women follow us from generation to generation, painting a predominately picturesque portrait of the price we pay, even among our families.  Primary schoolmaster Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno) and his wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) have a sprawling family with eight children, and she’s pregnant again.  The older children in their late teens are Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who embodies the transition from adolescence to adulthood in a world that demands conformity, and her somewhat slacker brother Dino (Patrick Gardner), clearly disillusioned by the idea of being relegated to a life as a common laborer, yet neither can complete their schooling due to the war.  The relentlessly curious Ada (Rachele Potrich) is around fourteen, one of the older students in her father’s schoolhouse, who hides a rebellious streak, while his pet favorite, the more studious Flavia (Anna Thaler), a voracious reader, is eleven.  There are also three younger boys and a baby, with the five oldest sharing two beds in a single bedroom.  There is no electricity in the village, and no indoor plumbing, so the living situation is rustic, where each day begins with the milking of the cows, as a handful of warmed, freshly gathered milk is carefully poured into the bowls of each child as they gather around the table.  Due to the cramped living quarters, no one has any privacy, so individual family members lock themselves into rooms when no one is looking, hide behind corners, or linger in the empty barn, just to have some time to themselves.  For the most part, the film follows three young women, Ada, Lucia, and Flavia, seen chattering among themselves in bed at night, archetypes in a search for emancipation, who move between the bonds of a patriarchal society and their desires for freedom, in a community very enclosed in itself, where the past is always present and where fate is marked by roads already assigned to each.  While there’s not really a story, per se, the film is framed around the interactions between the family and the neighboring community, told in brief vignettes, almost like a family photo album, as their daily routines come to life as they confront teen angst, forbidden desires, infant mortality, and WWII-era deprivation, often resorting to the rosary for their moral transgressions.  Also in the home is Adele’s widowed sister Cesira (Orietta Notari), who is secretly sheltering her son Attilio (Santiago Fondevila) out in the barn along with his illiterate friend Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), having brought a wounded and shell-shocked son back home, both fugitives, as they deserted from forced army service under the Nazis, known by the entire village that they are kept hidden, yet they join the family at church every Sunday.  No one stands up to the strict and rigid patriarch Cesare, whose influential position of authority is unchallenged, touching the lives of everyone, bringing education and culture to a region that couldn’t be more isolated, far removed from the rest of the world.  Adele questions her husband’s spending on a phonograph record, believing that money could be better spent on food (“It is food for the soul,” he retorts), but part of the pattern of life is hearing what he listens to intently in his study, including Vivaldi’s ebullient The Four Seasons Concerto No. 2 'Summer' - Allegro non ... YouTube (10:22), which he plays in his classroom, pointing out the intruding sounds of nature, specifically the way the composer uses music to mimic the sounds of birds, yet also the more ponderous reserve of a Chopin Nocturne, Arthur Rubinstein - Chopin Nocturne Op. 9, No. 1 in B flat YouTube (5:27).

Moving from season to season, this rhythm of life story revolves around the budding love affair of Lucia and the Sicilian army deserter Pietro, who are watched carefully by her younger sisters, culminating in their celebratory wedding, where the open-air festivities surrounded by the massive expanse of the Dolomites looming in the background is an extended spectacle, shot in stunning natural light by Mikhail Krichman, the renowned cinematographer of Andrey Zvyagintsev, featuring plenty of food and dancing to the rudimentary sounds of local musicians that make everything feel suspended in time.  It’s fair to say that Pietro may be the least developed character, where a distinct perspective shifts to that of Lucia after the end of the war, as Pietro goes away to visit his family in Sicily and mysteriously disappears, leaving a terrible void in his absence.  Instead the focus is on the influence and authoritative rule of Cesare, a complex character with considerable intellect and a talent for teaching, perhaps the only educated figure in the region, seen taking the kids on long walks into the forest, where in addition to teaching the grade school kids he runs an adult literacy class in the evenings, but despite his love for classical music and literature, he is emotionally distanced from the people around him, where his biggest flaw may be emotional neglect, particularly to those closest to him.  The most well-rounded portrait may be that of Ada, torn between faith and desire, and possibly queer, full of interior conflicts, where much of this world is seen through her prying eyes, tempted by her own desires and discoveries, like sharing private moments with her more assertively bold and “bad influence” friend Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), who likes to wear makeup and is typically seen smoking a cigarette in the barn, or sneaking a peek of erotica photographs kept hidden in her father’s desk, disappointed that he thinks she is underserving of any continuing education, saving that for Flavia alone, who is chosen to be sent away to boarding school in the city, leaving Ada’s options for the future extremely limited.  “Nothing’s special about me,” she confesses in church.  Based on the economic pressures of getting by, the parents can’t afford to send all the children on to further their education, and have to decide who among their daughters shows the most promise for school, and who is better suited to be a housewife, archaic rules that have been handed down for centuries.  The different ages of the sisters embody a different evolution of female desire, one adopting marriage and children, while another exhibits a curiosity about the different paths women may follow, even exploring other possible forms of love, while the youngest sister represents the future, including the possibility of adopting a more modern outlook that may counter tradition, possibly the only one of the sisters who will end up coming out of that suffocating everyday life.  With that in mind, Flavia may be the stand-in for the director, recalling many of her own memories (her father was from this same village, the youngest of a family with ten kids), visually embracing the female characters in their struggles, offering a feminist commentary on how women are trapped in traditional roles in such an unchanging patriarchal society, where the moral fabric of the entire community is formed by women who almost never leave their kitchens.  Extending beyond a war drama, this is something of a meditation on the ability to cope with events and the need to redefine oneself in the face of the challenges of life.  Exploring the fragile balance between collective memory and personal identity, Delpero has created a reminder of what it means to grow up in a small village, where family is the connecting glue, as no single character’s story is elevated over any others, and the film is less the narrative of an individual or couple than that of a collective, speaking a strange local dialect that must be translated to Italian, even playing with subtitles in Italian theaters.  One constant heard throughout is the relentless sound of baby noises, from just stirring around, yet also fussing and crying uncontrollably, often accompanied by a mother cooing or singing softly.  After the movie closes, we are left with the sounds of the village which can still be heard throughout the entirety of the end credits. 

Maura Delpero’s Closet Picks  Criterion selections on YouTube (3:36)