Fists in the Pocket (1965): A Disquieting, Macabre Satire of Family Values and Catholic Morality (Review)

Released to Criterion this week is a film that caused shock and outrage in its native Italy upon its release in 1965. Marco Bellocchio’s feature debut Fists in the Pocket is a disquieting, macabre and unique work that seemed designed to ruffle a few feathers, not only in its desire to satirise bourgeois family and social values and Catholic morality – conventions that Italy held dear – but also in its flagrant disregard for Italian cinema’s greatest post-war achievement; neorealism. So sacrilegious was Fists in the Pocket felt to be that it was turned down for selection at the Venice Film Festival with the recommendation that Bellocchio throw his labours away. When it finally did receive its premiere at the Locarno Festival, it earned condemnation from many leading lights, including Bellocchio’s two filmmaking idols, Luis Bunel and Michelangelo Antonioni. Their verdict may have stung the young leftist director from Bobbia in the Piacenza province of northern Italy, but he had the last laugh. Fists in the Pocket became a sleeper hit in Italy and gained critical and commercial acclaim internationally, most notably in France were it was ranked tenth in the Cahiers du Cinema’s Annual Top Ten List. In 2008, the film was placed on the Italian Ministry of Culture’s list of 100 Films to be Saved, a collection of movies that have “changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978”. Presently, as the movie is released to Blu-ray by Criterion, a remake entitled Rosebushpruning is in the works from Firebrand director Karim Ainouz and Dogtooth screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, with Kristen Stewart, Josh O’Connor and Elle Fanning set to star.

Inspired by Bellocchio’s own sense of dissatisfaction and resentment growing up in Bobbio, Fists in the Pocket tells the story of a dysfunctional family beset by various afflictions and cloistered by their provincial Italian villa, located in the very region the director had spent his formative years in. The family consists of a blind, vulnerable matriarch (Liliana Gerace) and her four adult children; Augusto, the breadwinner, played by Marino Mase, Guilia (Paola Pitagora), who sends poison pen letters to Augusto’s girlfriend Lucia (Jeannie McNeil), the epileptic Alessandro (Lou Castel) and Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), who is epileptic and has learning difficulties. The protagonist of Bellocchio’s movie, the disturbing driving force of the narrative is Alessandro, or ‘Ale’ for short. A deeply troubled individual who seems determined to express the pent-up bitterness and sense of rebellion within him, Ale begins to consider the life of his eldest brother, Augusto. Aware that it is his desire to leave the family home to marry Lucia and be fully independent, Ale concocts a nihilistic plan that will help his brother break free from the family ties and achieve his aims – he will kill his mother, Guilia, Leone and himself.

Ale’s initial plan is to drive the family off a cliff, but a case of last minute nerves stymies this plot. Undeterred, he resolves to rid Augusto of his burden and pushes his blind mother to her death from the very same clifftop. Later, he will give Leone a fatal overdose of medication and drown his comatose body in the bath, before turning his attentions to Guilia, the sister he has an incestuously close bond with.

Released in 1965, Fists in the Pocket managed to capture somewhat presciently the student protests that would come to dominate much of the western world in 1968. This affinity with the dissatisfaction the younger generations felt towards the capitalist, patriarchal system of the west was understandable, given Bellocchio’s political sympathies. Enthused by a desire to change society and encouraged by his friend and mentor Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bellocchio would ultimately find a home within the Maoist group, the Union of Italian Communists (Marxist-Leninist). These sympathies were also shared by his lead actor, Lou Castel. Prior to this breakout role, the Colombian-born son of a Swedish diplomat was not an actor. He had appeared as an uncredited extra in Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic The Leopard, but his real interests lay in communism, having been introduced to the ideology by his Irish mother. Like Bellocchio, this too led to his involvement with the UCI (m-l), but his immigrant status saw him deported as an ‘undesirable alien’ by Italian authorities in 1972. This setback did not affect his screen career however and he would go on to work with directors such as Wim Wenders, Claude Chabrol, George P. Cosmatos, Michael Haneke and John Frankenheimer.

Whilst it could be argued that the left wing student revolutionary movement of the late sixties found an implicit dark hero whose sole desire to see the world burn for the sake of his fellow man (in this case his brother) is one they could share in, Bellocchio’s choice of title – Fists in the Pocket – suggests an inarticulate, poised rage they could also identify with. Yet the title itself doesn’t translate visually to Ale’s physicality on screen. Bellucchio wants us to note the peculiarity of Ale’s tics and physical patterns – and pattern is a fitting word, because the repetition of them seems to be the key. Ale has a persistent habit of placing his extended hand before his nose, before folding it over into a balled, closed position. He rocks on his chair at the dining table; stretching his arm across the sideboard behind him as he leans back, with Bellocchio’s camera pointedly capturing the placement of his hand, before rocking forward to return to the seated, upright position at the table. At one point he measures Augusto’s desk, thumbs extended, fist over fist. The repetitive nature of these quirks imply a desire to control a world otherwise beyond his reach and power. It’s an obsessive compulsion to manage not only his immediate surroundings but, it could be argued, his own body because, as we come to see from his epileptic fits, his corporeal state is not something he can always have mastery of. Sometimes, Ale wilfully mocks his own vulnerability, dragging his legs as if he no longer has control of them and crawling across spaces. This, combined with his sudden and rigorous hisses, may be an indicator of the untrained, inexperienced Castel’s penchant for ad-libbing; something which infuriated his co-star Marino Mase.

If all this sounds unlikeable, it’s wholly intentional. After all, I don’t think that a character who wishes to do away with his family is meant to be likeable. But it’s important to note that there’s not many sympathetic characters – beyond the movie’s victims, the mother and Leone – on offer here at all. We may, like Ale, sympathise with Augusto’s plight – it must be hard to be the sole supporter of a family with several complex needs – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Augusto is a good man. When Ale takes his mother and siblings out for the day, he leaves a note behind for his older brother outlining his intentions to drive off a cliff. Faced with this information, Augusto doesn’t race off to stop his younger brother. Instead, he pays a visit to Lucia and when he confides in her about the note Ale has left for him, he remains unmoved by his girlfriends protestations and demands that he act. “Whatever was going to happen has already happened” he calmly explains. He knows that he will benefit from Ale’s murderous and self destructive endeavours, though Bellocchio wishes it to be known that he would never have the peculiar ‘courage’ to act upon them himself. After the death of their mother, neither he nor his sister Guilia report their suspicions of their brother to the authorities. Despite Guilia being in danger, they both show assent to Ale’s murderous scheme.

Paola Pitagora’s Guilia is another interesting character in terms of unlikability. Right from the opening scene we are aware that she is the author of threatening letters to Augusto’s girlfriend Lucia. These poisonous missives, with text cut from magazines and newspapers in the tradition of anonymous ransom demands, appear to have more in common with the motives of a jealous and spurned lover than those of a sister, and we later see how she not only indulges the incestuous affections that Ale has towards her, but also – in showing Augusto the love poetry their younger sibling has dedicated to her – we witness her seeming attempts to make her older brother jealous. This troubled nature is also implicitly shown by Bellocchio in the set dressing of her bedroom, which is littered with photos of Marlon Brando. Nothing unusual there you might say, Brando was an attractive Hollywood star and a pin up for many young women. Well yes that’s true, but take a look at the one photograph that takes pride of place, framed by her bedside, so that it is the first thing she sees as she wakes and the last thing she sees as she goes to sleep. It’s a picture of Brando in Edward Dmytryk’s 1958 film The Young Lions, dressed in the full uniform of a Nazi officer. Given Italy’s living memory support for fascism, this is a boldly contentious choice that is full of dark and disturbing connotations for Guilia’s character.

As usual with Criterion, their release of Fists in the Pocket comes with several informative and enlightening extras. These include interviews from 2005 with Bellocchio, Castel and Pitagora, along with the film’s editor, Silvano Agosti, critic Tullio Kezich, and filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. There is also a new interview with film scholar Stefano Albertini and, unavailable to this reviewer, an essay by film critic Deborah Young.

Mark’s Archive: Fists in the Pocket (1965)