Fists in Pockets (Pugni in Tasche), Marco Bellocchio
A peer of Bertolucci and Pasolini, Bellocchio was twenty-six in 1965 when he made Fists in Pockets, his first feature film. What begins as a pitiless rendering of an Italian bourgeois family is transformed, at more or less the sixtieth minute, into a tale of mythic proportion.
The film’s action revolves around Alessandro, the second son of landowners in Emilia-Romagna. (Played by Lou Castel.) He’s a lost soul, with no real job or occupation. Though we never learn much about the farm or landholding or any of its workers, we see that Papa is deceased and eldest son Augusto shoulders the burden of the family finances, which are in poor shape. Most of the action takes place within the villa itself and its immediate surroundings. The villa is a hodgepodge of dark rooms crammed with ancestor portraits and heirlooms, connected by shadowy hallways that end at closed doors. Adding to the ambient creepiness, the camera often peers through the frosted glass of these closed doors (indeed one even has supporting tape across its broken glass) as family members spy on one another. The claustrophobia is intense.
Alessandro suffers from a pent-up rage which drives the action. He can’t bear living with his family, and in that house, but has nowhere else to go. Other than his sporadic tutoring of a farm worker’s son and the feeding of the family’s rabbits, he has no work and hasn’t a clue as to what kind of work he might eventually do. He’s attracted to his sister Giulia (maybe more than attracted, that’s not altogether clear), who in her turn shows signs of imbalance. She also has no idea of what to do with her life. Elder brother Augusto would like to marry his fiancée Lucia and move with her to an apartment in town, but there’s not enough money for that. And not enough money to place their blind mother in a nursing home, where she might get better care. Indeed! he exclaims—They don’t even have health insurance! Then there’s the fourth and youngest child, the intellectually disabled Leone, who must be continually monitored. Did I mention that both Alessandro and Leone suffer frequent epileptic attacks? This family’s a lot of fun.
Alessandro loves elder brother Augusto and wants to do right by him. He’d like Augusto to marry Lucia and live in freedom and the only way such a thing could happen would be for the rest of them to . . . um . . . disappear. And so he takes matters into his own hands. Starting with their mother. Anyway, that‘s just the beginning. We get to watch a crazed Alessandro pull down the house and everything in it—pictures, carpets, furniture—and set a fire to it all in the courtyard, with Giulia at his side, laughing all the way, as Director Bellocchio trashes the tired pieties of bourgeois Italian life, beginning with Mamma and moving to Church and State.
For anyone who’s thought a lot about the blessings and burdens of the nuclear family, Fists in Pockets was—especially at the ending where Lou Castel, in advance of an epileptic fit, sings and dances to the ravishing strains of La Traviata—cathartic.