sound and fury
by
Douglas Messerli
Marco
Bellocchio (writer and director) I pugni
in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)
1965, USA
Marco
Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket of
1965, was one of a series of films by younger directors such as Pasolini that
completely transformed Italian filmmaking. It had the loose and structure and
visual energy of the French New Wave, but expressed its Italian connections with
grand family fictions such as The Leopard,
without any of the latter’s splendor.
This family was far closer to Jean-Pierre
Melville’s—himself a precursor to the New Wave directions—Les enfants Terrible, with its characters” incestuous glances and
pants, focusing on the weak-willed and spoiled boy who prefers death to life.
There is even an element in this work that might remind one of the wealthy
family in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, of
five years earlier, who near the end of the film are visited by the vulgar Italian
superstars and the raggazi-hangers-on—only this Italian family of former wealth
has now become simply a nest of loonies, who even the course-cut provincials
realize are beyond salvation.
Their middle-aged mother (Liliana
Gerace), with the demeanor of a permanent saint, painfully suffers it all; but
then she is both symbolically and literally blind; she not only cannot see the
madness going on around her, she clearly wishes not to know what is happening.
They meals together might be described as something close to a ghoulish funeral
gathering.
This family of horrors survives through
the unnamed work of Augusto, the only seemingly stable one among them. Yet
Bellocchio reveals him to be a brutal opportunist, a man who regularly visits
the whores, while yet applying his charms to the local beauties such as the
seemingly “normal” Lucia (Jenny MacNeil)—who is startled by the family’s
seeming eccentricities.
Despite this “nest of ninnes,” the
sensitive viewer does come to feel for each of them, particularly for the
brightest and maddest of them all Allesandro, who, as critic Deborah Young,
argues, takes on the collective family guilt, determined to allow the
bread-earning Augusto the possibility of escaping his familial responsibilities
and to live a somewhat normal life—despite the fact that each night, we
discover, he and his friends demonstrate their madness by shooting at
rats.
He first pushes his mother off the cliff
to her death, then poisons Leone with extra dose of his medicine, while putting him into a bath.
Giulia almost does herself in by falling down the family staircase in reaction to Leone’s death, perceiving that
her beloved “Ale” has done him in; and, even in the throes of her recovery,
Sandro (another of his family nicknames) is almost tempted smother her to
death. Is it any wonder that, now married to the local gentry, Lucia, Augusto
wants to move out of the villa into an apartment in town?
As she recovers, Giulia reveals to
Augusto that their little Sandro has been behind their mother’s and brother’s
deaths. But who might believe him, if Augusto took up the matter with the
police; and besides, we all know that this cold-hearted beast, is not entirely
unappreciative of his younger brother’s actions.
In the very last scene, having nearly
achieved his goals of destroying those about him, he goes into what can only
described as a kind of transcendent dance of celebration not unlike that of
Electra, while listening, in this version, to Verdi’s La
Traviata, spinning around the room while uttering a strange series of
animal cries unknown to human language. Suddenly he is again struck down by the
painful throbs that emanate from his head, and which only Guilia can calm.
Throughout, composer Ennio Morricone,
through an almost ethereal series of bells and gongs, has made aware,
simultaneously, that we have been witnessing a kind final rites ceremony for
this unhappy family, none of whom are truly capable of surviving in the real
world.
Orange,
California, February 24, 2017
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