Review: Fists in the Pocket

This Italian gothic is immediately engrossed by the stagnant air that enshrines its milieu.

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Fists in the Pocket
Photo: Peppercorn-Wormser Film Enterprises

The visual propulsiveness of Marco Bellocchio’s feature film debut, Fists in the Pocket, is its style. Prefiguring Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienaga by 35 years, this Italian gothic is immediately engrossed by the stagnant air that enshrines its milieu. Alberto Marrama’s camera affects a slow-moving fun house ride through a provincial Italian house and the world outside. It’s as if tracks have been placed on the characters’ exposed nerves and every path approaches abstraction. Indeed, it’s a disconcerting thing in a black-and-white film when a woman points to a line of prostitutes and says, “The one in red.”

The film, whose Ennio Morricone score suggests a hushed lullaby, is soaked in the iconography of a world in transition. Through a haze of simmering sexual tensions, suicide threats, seizure attacks, and slaps across the face emerges Alesandro (Lou Castel), a young man with the face of Doogie Howser and the personality of Stanley Kowalski. Implicit in his pathological behavior isn’t so much a gross disconnect from the world, but a mad desperation to transcend his forced provincialism and family: his mother (Liliana Gerace), a blind coot with perpetual circles around her eyes; Giulia (Paola Pitagora), who harbors incestuous feelings for her siblings; and the mentally handicapped youngest brother, Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio), who gets the most lucid declaration in the film (“What torture, living in this house”).

When Augusto (Marino Masé), the eldest son, learns of Alesandro’s plan to precipitate a “collective suicide,” his shock settles into what could be considered relief when his fiancée, Lucia (Jeannie McNeil), arrives on the scene, implying that he, too, believes that his salvation is dependent on his family’s demise. Throughout, Alesandro’s behavior recalls the mania of a caged animal, but often his crazed tricks reveal the animal in others. The graphic intensity of the film begins to lose its luster by film’s end, but if Alesandro’s behavior at a party is any indication, perhaps Bellocchio is attempting to spoof Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte and, by extension, to reveal his main character’s misguided sense of privilege. The film comes on strong—no Linda Blair-style pisser in the living room to foreshow its fireworks—and, perhaps appropriately, ends with something close to an exorcism.

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 Cast: Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé, Liliana Gerace, Jeannie McNeill, Gianni Schicchi, Mauro Martini, Stefania Troglio, Pier Luigi Troglio, Irene Agnelli  Director: Marco Bellocchio  Screenwriter: Marco Bellocchio  Distributor: Peppercorn-Wormser Film Enterprises  Running Time: 108 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1965  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

1 Comment

  1. Burn the first paragraph of this review. And watch this unsettling flic with a shot or two of your favorite alcoholic beverage.

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