Fists in the Pocket [1965]

 Marco Bellocchio’s sensational debut feature Fists in the Pocket – which immediately catapulted him into the highest echelons of Italian cinema and made him a flagbearer of sociocultural subversion – landed with the explosive fury of raining embers. Younger viewers hailed it as a radical, groundbreaking work for its gallows humour, scorching ferocity, fiendish audacity, blasphemous impishness, and stunning obliteration of conventional familial values and Catholic morality. Made a couple of years before the 1968 student protests, it particularly resonated with those seething at bourgeois traditions and on the verge of revolutionary outburst; older and conservative audience, including the church, were outraged by it for the same reasons. Buñuel, incidentally, also took offence by it, which was especially ironic coming from the subversive Spanish giant, and more so given its Buñuelesque tone. With a coolly modernist palette that mirrored the ongoing Nouvelle Vague in France, it revolved around the unhinged man-child and punk loose cannon Alessandro (played with understated rage and deadpan malevolence by Lou Castel), who’s hell-bent on annihilating his family – once aristocratic but now languishing in dysfunctional torpor – to free his handsome eldest brother Augusto (Marino Masè) of the financial burden of their blind, religious mother and dim, epileptic brother. Meanwhile, he’s also grotesquely desirous of his beautiful elder sister Giulia (Paola Pitagora), who in turn is infatuated with Augusto. One, therefore, experiences a torrid deluge of repressed desires, shocking violence and sardonic irreverence in this superbly shot tour de force that, unsurprisingly, ended in an electrifying burst of theatricality. Ennio Morricone’s manic and haunting score provided the feverish icing on this macabre cake that, paradoxically, was filmed in Bellocchio’s mother’s country villa and partly financed by his brothers.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Religious Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy