Marx Can Wait Review: Marco Bellocchio’s Haunted Reverie of Regret and Loss

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

Marx Can Wait
Photo: Strand Releasing

Marco Bellocchio’s Marx Can Wait is a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, the story of the Italian filmmaker’s fraternal twin, Camillo, who died by suicide in 1968, but also of Marco and his family struggling after more than 50 years with that tragedy. Marco navigates his repressed memories and those of his relatives as they collectively unpack their loved one’s death, using the film as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

The documentary begins at a convivial 2016 family gathering where the topic of Camillo arises in peripheral conversations whispered between elderly members. Even today, the family is circumspect in discussing the matter, referring obliquely to a “veil of melancholy that never left him.” As the director starts to speak more directly about Camillo to his surviving siblings, a portrait of grief gradually emerges that contrasts with Marco’s artistic life.

According to the family, Marco and Camillo were creative and restless in their youth, but where Marco latched onto filmmaking and went on to international success after the release of Fists in the Pocket, Camillo struggled to find his calling. With Marco bouncing between festivals and hobnobbing with other artists, he failed to notice Camillo’s worsening mental health. Though no one blames Marco for neglecting his twin, it soon becomes evident that he feels an indirect responsibility for the way his success deepened Camillo’s depression.

Advertisement

Marco makes clear that his and his relatives’ sense of culpability stems as much from the legacy of shame and repression handed down by Catholic dogma as it does from their shared filial grief. For one, he and his siblings make repeated references to their mother’s intense devotion and her fear of hell, something they chuckle about now that she’s passed but which clearly informs an inherited shame over the stigma of suicide in Christian teaching.

YouTube video

Though the other family members don’t come across as apostates, they clearly have a more modern view of Catholicism, making sarcastic note of how metaphysical notions such as the existence of limbo have been eradicated by Vatican councils in a reminder of the mortal judgments guiding supposedly immovable divine law. Such asides come to stand in for more direct attacks on how religious codes have kept them all silent on Camillo for so long.

Marx Can Wait makes a pointed implication about the weight of Catholicism on Italian identity, then charts a holistic attempt to understand Camillo’s death and his family’s attitude toward it. Marco thoughtfully parallels his and Camillo’s lives as children born on the eve of World War II with the chaotic political upheavals within Italy and Europe as they came of age in the 1960s. For Marco, his social awakening coincided with his entry into filmmaking, which brought him celebrity and wealth at a time when he considered himself a political radical.

Advertisement

Marco recounts with a sad flatness how he ignored some of his twin’s letters, and in attempting to explain Camillo’s death to younger members of the family, he reveals more and more of his guilt over not recognizing his brother’s pain. Tellingly, Marco struggles to articulate the depths of Camillo’s depression, having been so self-absorbed at the time that he cannot elaborate on his brother’s despair beyond a lack of career direction. Using clips from his early films, Marco poignantly reveals how plot points and snatches of dialogue contain evidence of his shame, so that his brother’s ghost now seems to haunt those films.

Marx Can Wait’s title derives from an admonishment that Camillo made to his twin shortly before his death. In context, it called out Marco’s inability to see the faddishness of his political engagement in the face of actual social need, but for Marco it has become the ultimate indictment of his failure to notice the warning signs of Camillo’s impending doom. Despite being a lapsed Catholic, Marco ultimately comes to use Marx Can Wait as a confessional, though in admitting his sins he doesn’t behave as if he absolves himself. Despite the many years that it took to speak this openly on the topic, the film represents only the first step, not the last, in truly coming to terms with his personal trauma.

Score: 
 Director: Marco Bellocchio  Screenwriter: Marco Bellocchio  Distributor: Strand Releasing  Running Time: 91 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.