FILMCOMMENT
rivista edita dalla
Film Society of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts di New York
nel numero attualmente in commercio, del mese di Marzo Aprile 2004
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From the stagnation of bourgeois domesticity to the repressive machination of Church and State, the ever restless MARCO BELLOCCHIO continues to expose the psychic malaise of Italy's social order
by Deborah Young(*)
MARCO BELLOCCHIO'S OFFICE lies just outside the center of Rome, between the church of Sant'Agnese and the Iranian embassy. For a director whose work has fiercely attacked the Catholic Church and political repression, there is symbolism there.
Behind his desk I noticed a familiar abstract painting. It's by Daria Calvelli, the sister of his editor and companion, Francesca Calvelli. Daria's work also appears in the director's My Mother's Smile (02), a film that again springs to mind when he warns me that our conversation has a deadline: he has to pick up his eight-year-old daughter from school, just like a sequence from that movie. It was an amusing sign that, for Bellocchio, art and life interpenetrate.
A quick, wiry man at 64, Bellocchio is enjoying a time of renewed creativity. Following the critical and popular successes of his two most recent films, My Mother's Smile and Good Morning, Night (03), his career his in full swing. You could say he is drawing togheter its various threads: the politically militant films of his youth, his psychoanalytic broodings on sex in the Eighties, and his lifelong filmic reflections on himself as an artist. It's as though his work had reached a point of dynamic equilibrium, where he feels free and secure in his creative voice, and anything is possible.
Bellocchio was 26 and just out of film school when he made his seminal first feature, Fist in His Pocket (65), with money borrowed from the family he was about to artistically savage. Shot in his hometown of Piacenza - in his mother's house - this key Sixties film contains virtually all the themes in his later work. But its success would prove to be a ball and chain: until recently, Bellocchio felt it overshadowed all his subsequent films. It knocked the pants off critics and viewers, was loved and loathed with equal passion, and earned huffy put-downs from Buñuel and Antonioni, two of the young director's heroes.
It's still a knockout today. Disparaging, ferocoius, blasphemous, and subversive, Fist in His Pocket remains a frontal assault on family values and Catholic morality. At its center is a monstrous family, formerly well-to-do, now vegetating in a state of infantilism and dependency, only springing to life for dinner-table shouting matches. Both antihero Ale (played by Lou Castel, an intense young Swedish actor Bellocchio met at film school) and his retarded brother are epileptics, his sister Giulia is mentally unstable, the older brother and breadwinner Augusto is selfish and insensitive, the elderly mother is blind and to cap it off, there are hints of incest between Ale and Giulia.. The story concerns Ale's decision to precipitate the family's "collective suicide". He starts by pushing Mama off a cliff.
At first, Ale manic energy steers the family out of its dead end. Things begin to stir in the rambling country house. Funerals (with much black humor) fill the place with people, Augusto plans to get married, and Ale decides to start a chinchilla farm. But how could a film with an Ennio Morricone soundtrack inspired by the funeral dirge "Dies Irae" turn out well? Shot in black-and-white in a clean up-close camera style that reflects how carefully Bellocchio understood the Nouvelle Vague, the film has a bleak immediacy that grabs you by the throat and won't let go until its gleehfully bitter end.
A few years down the road, Fist would be seen as a harbinger of the student protest mindset of 1968, and one of its first manifestos against paralyzing middle-class convention. About the same time, Bellocchio's Marxist-Leninist period began. In his second film, China is Near (67), the family becomes the locus of social struggle between the bourgeoisie and a co-opted working class. When Carlo (Paolo Graziosi), a young Socialist, loses his position on the city council to the richer Vittorio (Glauco Mauri), he decides to climb the social ladder by getting Vittorio's sister pregnant. Meanwhile, Carlo's ex also became pregnant and forces Vittorio to marry her. The film hovers problematically between grotesque caricature (there's a scene in which a priest interrupts an abortion) and a worthy attempt to criticize the extraparliamentary groups of the time from within the Left itself. The following year, Bellocchio joined the Italian Communist Union and gave up fiction to make militant documentarios chronicling May Day parades and squatters in public housing, among other topics. Mental patients are the subject of the most memorable of this social docs, Fit to Be Untied (75), which he directed with editor Silvano Agosti and scriptwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli.
Pasolini famously remarked that Bellocchio and Bertolucci (another middle-class boy from the Po Valley) where the best examples of the opposition of poetry (Bertolucci) and prose (Bellocchio) in the new Italian cinema. It must have been quite a coup for them to be asked to direct episodes of the omnibus Love and Anger (69) alongside Pasolini, Godard, and Carlo Lizzani. In his segment, "Let's Talk" ("Discutiamo, discutiamo"), Bellocchio tipically chose to film university students reciting left- and right-wing slogans.
By the 1971, political militancy was largely behind Bellocchio, although with In the Name of the Father (71) he still shows an inclination to side with the poor and downtrodden. Set in a Catholic boarding-school and filmed in quasi-surreal style, the film reorchestrate Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite in a radical political key. Because the boys are much older than Vigo's students, Bellocchio is able to offset their struggle for liberation from the stuffy repression of their teachers with a social and political critique of their own motives and goals. His attitude toward the main character, Angelo, played by Yves Beneyton as a kind of icy Hitler youth, is ambiguous. On one hand, he leads the revolt to tear down the school, which is shown as powerful but utterly mediocre, an instrument through which the Catholic Church inculcates its conservative class values; on the other, his destructiveness seems headed in a disturbing despotic direction. As with Fist, the film caused a mayor flurry.
The next three films show Bellocchio searching for a new voice. Both Put the Monster on Page One (72), a journalistic thriller taken over from another filmmaker, and Victory March (76), with its adulterous love triangle set against a hellish army boot camp, moved him in a conventional direction. Psychoanalytic symbolism, which would play a major role in his Eighties films, first rears its heads in his 1978 adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull
A certain conceptual staidness afflicts Leap into the Void (80), though this classy art-house film boasts a maliciously ironic script and memorable performances from Michel Piccoli (dubbed by Vittorio Caprioli) and Anouk Aimée as a middle-aged brother and sister who live togheter like husband and wife in a sexless but morbidly dependent relationship. The family again. Piccoli seemingly the dominant sibling, is an investigating magistrate prone to hair-raising boutsbouts of infantilism; he bullies a scroungy avant-garde theater director (Michele Placido) into promising to kill his sister, but things don't quite work out as planned. The film's considerable technical skill uderscores Bellocchio's developing mastery of the medium, particularly his pictorial sense. (Before settling on film, he studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London.) In The Eyes, The Mouth (82) and his adaptation of Pirandello's Henry IV (84), Bellocchio continued to employ mayor European actors (Marcello Mastroianni, Angela Molina) in films whose originality often got lost in turgid psychological meanderings and heavy symbolism. A new direction was clearly needed.
BEGINNING WITH Devil in The Flesh (86), Bellocchio gave a novel spin to a perennial vexing question: If you're not supposed to sleep with your analyst, is it okay to at least make films with him? Having participated in group therapy sessions with the controversial Massimo Fagioli for many years, Bellocchio asked the psychotherapist to step in creatively. It was, he says, an "emergency situation, when I and [Dutch actress Maruschka] Detmers felt unable to achieve what we were after. Massimo was at my side during the shooting and editing. This rather revolutionary intervention put my identity as an artist in question. It opened horizons not only of content, but freedom of form". As indeed it might.
Based on a Raymond Radiguet novel more successfully adapted by Claude Autant-Lara in 1947, Devil in The Flesh revolves around the obsession of a young bourgeois student (Federico Pitzalis) with an eccentric girl (Detmers) whose father has been killed by the Red Brigades and who is, absurdly, engaged to a terrorist as middle-class as she is. Though the scenes of terrorists copulating behind bars during their trial (based in facts) are notable, today the picture is chiefly remembered for a legendary fellatio scene that predates The Brown Bunnies by nearly two decades.
Bellocchio's next three films struggle with psychoanalytic problems involving male-female relations and the use of language. In The Witches' Sabbath (made sans Fagioli in 1988), a young psychiatrist (Daniel Ezralow) is called in to determinate the sanity of a self-styled witch (Béatrice Dalle) accused of trying to kill her lover. Bellocchio says he was concerned with eliminating realistic space-time references. Actually, the nonsequential, dreamlike images - memorably filmed by Giuseppe Lanci - overpower the narrative. One senses that the director is dealing with very personal issues, probably those from his psychoanalisis with Fagioli, but has not worked them to an artistic conclusion. This may explain why the film remains singularly unsatisfying.
This kind of "visionary and figurative extremism", as Bellocchio puts it, translates into forced abstraction in The Conviction (91) and The Dream of the Butterfly (94). The Conviction tells two stories, that of a woman who accuses a man of raping her in a museum at night, and a persecuting attorney unable to satisfy his wife sexually. It takes a lot of intellectualizing to connect the two couples and ferret out a theme (Harlan Kennedy does a convincing job in tht July/August 1994 issue of FILMCOMMENT) and, in the process, you might miss the film's poetry. Typical of Bellocchio's films from this period, it tends to operate more on a cerebral than instinctive level - though it starts out promisingly with a raw sexual act in the locked museum.
Bellocchio acknowledges that Fagioli, who co-wrote The Conviction, had a particular influence over the final sequence, featuring a lusty peasant girl - at best a headscratching addendum. On Butterfly, the situation was even more complex, says Bellocchio: "I directed his script". A young actor, whose mather (Bibi Andersson) is a poet, refuses to speak except by using dialogue from stage plays. True to the title, the international cast seems to flutter throgh a world of insubstantial symbols, while the dialogue strains for profundity.
As problematic as these films are, Bellocchio maintains that "if you're interested in my work, you can't pretend that this collaboration wasn't important. I still pay attention to that experience; it still informs my work". This period of stylistic expolration broke his films out of a conventional art-film mold but cost him much of his audience.
Director and analyst went their separate creative ways in the mid-Nineties, and Bellocchio's next film, his third theater adaptation, The Prince of Homburg (97), was a breath of fresh air. A youthful hero wins an important battle by disobeying orders and is condemned to death by the Grand Elector. Though it seems the polar opposite of his sarcastically antiwar Victory March, it is certainly the more interesting picture. It sets aside political questions - and there are many, given the militarism of Heinrich Von Kleist's 1811 play, a patriotic call to arms against Napoleon - for a psychodrama played out in resonating dream imagery. If you read the prince's sleepwalking as an unconscious state in which one's senses are heightened to the utmost, he is a metaphor for the artist at work - that is, the director. The play, wich is quoted in Dream of the Butterfly, obviously has a very personal meaning for the director.
Bellocchio has twice filmed versions of Pirandello's work. His transposition of the play Henry IV to modern-day Italy remains distant, wordy, and obscure, despite Mastroianni's luminous performance as a mad, playacting aristocrat who thinks he's the German emperor. One can see how the theme of madness attracted the director, but Pirandello's Chinese boxes of paradoxes prove too much even for this visually inventive film.
He had greater success adapting Pirandello's novella The Nanny (99). Dr. Mori (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a dedicated 19th century psychiatrist, is the proud father of an infant son, but the child refuses the milk of its mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). In an unforgettable scene, he visits a country town where a dozen young, barebreasted peasant women have been assembled for his inspection. He selects a darkly attractive girl (Maya Sansa) he has glimpsed earlier from the train, setting up a situation that will involve more than just wet-nursing. And the audience has no trouble choosing between earth mother Sansa and the doc's neurotic wife, suffering from postpartum depression. The latter's early exit from the film signals an embryonic love affair between Bentivoglio and Sansa, but, dashing expectations, Bellocchio spins the film's eroticism off into a tidy, adult ending. The Nanny ranks as one of his most accessible films, one of the very few in which Bellocchio doesn't fall back on a final ambiguity in order to either force a more complex reading or, in the worst cases, dodge the question raised by the film. Its unusual narrative clarity suggests a director who is trying to draw closer to his audience. It's an experiment that is improved upon in the next two films, each of which offers a different solution.
HANGING ON TO most of The Nanny's clarity but jettisoning its facile psychology, Bellocchio followed up with 2002's magical My Mother's Smile (aka The Religion Hour). Premise: Ernesto (Sergio Castellitto), a well-known painter and confirmed atheist, suddenly discovers there's a movement afoot to canonize his late, hated mother. Around this idea, Bellocchio weaves his obsessions with family oppression and the artist to break free from hypocrisy, convention, and conditioning. "If you dont send fathers and mothers to hell", Ernesto blasphemously declares to his haute bourgeoise aunt, "the world will never change".
And what did the mother do to become a saint? She nagged Ernesto's mad brother Egidio (who looks like an older, angst-twisted version of Lou Castel) to stop "blaspheming" - until he killed her. That is, she was "martyred". Her enigmatically smiling face dominates a wall-size photo in the family house. Every member of Ernesto's family - his estranged wife, his ex-terrorist brother, his scheming aunt - sees personal advantage in his mother canonization. Ernesto alone needs to be sold on their Pascalian wager, by which "paradise is life insurance".
This is, as Bellocchio himself notes, a kind of sequel to Fist in His Pocket and at the same time a real "step towards liberation in regard to the persecuting gost of my first film". His scathing view of the bourgeois world he was born into is all the more deadly now because it's expressed not with youthful rage but with mature artistic control. And its chosen canvas is Western culture in the broadest sense: Renaissance art and architecture, John Taverner's music, Ernesto's paintings, his son's elementary school where class and social values are instilled, and, looming over everything, the Catholic Church.
Just under the film's surface is a latent surrealism that renews Bellocchio's link to Buñuel, though Fellini also springs to mind during Ernesto's foray into an almost nightmarish cocktail party for Rome's high clercy. Taking offense at his skeptical smile, a crackpot monarchist (Toni Bertorelli, the Great Elector in The Prince of Homburg) challenges him to a duel. Their eerie sword fight at down, with the dome of St. Peter's as a backdrop, is a quintessential Bellocchian moment, filled with inexplicable emotion. It leaves the viewer as shaken - and as puzzled - as Ernesto.
Ultimately, the iconoclastic forces of beauty and eros prove more powerful than the living death of society's conventions and institutions. Ernesto's moral victory is encapsulated by his digital toppling of a seemingly irremovable eyesore, Rome's Victor Emmanuel monument (whose ugliness is said to have driven at least one architect mad), as his family, clad in blak, makes its climatic, funereal visit to the Holy Father to urge canonization. He then proceeds to unleash his own life force by finally bedding his son's mysterious "religion teacher" (Chiara Conti). Underlining this life/death choice are the paintings that appear over the end credits (many by Bellocchio), depicting domestic scenes populated by death-mask figures.
FOR ITALIA VIEWERS, Good Morning, Night has special resonance. For those who lived through the terrorism of the Seventies, a harsh period of irrational violence and ideological confusion that culminated in the murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978, Bellocchio's latest film is viewed with emotions surprisingly close to the surface, which may help explain the outcry after it was passed over for the Golden Lion jury prize at Venice last year. This "scandal" has had bizarre and paradoxical consequences, even influencing the way Berlusconi's Ministry of Culture continues to restructure the festival's organizing commitee with the professed aim of avoiding similar juries in the future. One can only imagine Bellocchio's feelings.
The film is certainly among his finest. Though not as dense or mysteriously resonant as My Mother's Smile, probably because it lacks an autobiographical edge, its retellig of Moro's kidnapping and imprisonment by the Red Brigates is gripping. It goes far beyond the overt politics of China is Near and Put the Monster on Page One's incorporation of real-life political events into a fictional framework, toning down those films' political fervor in favor of a more distanced view (Moro's fate is a given, after all, at least for Italians viewers). Following the action through the eyes of an invented character, the doubting terrorist Chiara (Maya Sansa), it divides the story into two realities (the historical realities as we know it and Chiara's dream version) to arrive at two completely opposite endings. "The style of the film isn't realistic, and its object isn't historical truth", Bellocchio warns. Most surprisingly, the film inspires genuine sorrow and pathos for a politician for whom few Italians really cared. It's safe to say this work will be a reference point for all future Italian films dealing with the Red Brigates.
Bellocchio's cinema has now come full circle and has matured in the process. The calculating bourgeois terrorist who is supposed to marry Maruschka Detmers in Devil in the Flesh and Ernesto's rudderless ex-terrorist brother in My Mothers Smile have finally turned into all-too-human characters who hardly know why they're killing their prisoner. Good Morning, Night deepens our insight into the political cancer of terrorism by linking in to the everyday life of a perverse "family". Chiara's fantasy of drugging her fellow terrorists at dinner around a kitchen table could have been planned by Ale back in Fist in His Pocket, except that its objective is the compassionate act of allowing Moro to escape.
When Bellocchio burst onto the scene in 1965 with Fist in His Pocket just a year after Bertolucci startled audiences with Before the Revolution, the two young men, both from intellectual, well-to-do families but otherwise very different, were hailed as pioneers of a new Italian cinema that would renew the ranks of the Fellini - Visconti - Antonioni generation. Almost 40 years later, they remain giants on the Italian sceneand yet they're masters without followers. It's hard to trace their direct influence on the work of the film-makers who followed, such as the eclectic cinephile Gianni Amelio, Fellini-lover Giuseppe Tornatore, and Gabriele Salvatores, who takes his inspiration from Sevnties American independent cinema.
Bellocchio's artistic evolution has made it particularly tricky to chart his influence. His torturous detour into psychoanalysis, for instance, helped him bravely explore his most intimate thoughts and obsessions. But Italian directors seem to have little time for this kind of dramatic introspection today (though you might argue that Nanni Moretti and his followers, having learned to externalize their inner lives in a comic vein, are a variation).
Certainly Bellocchio's sophisticated experiments with realism and style have raised the bar for those who follow. But who, in the new generation, is even trying? Perhaps a fringe of passionate individualists like Silvio Soldini and Mario Martone, each intent on taking film drama in a very personal direction. I think his long-term influence is likely to be more on an inspiration level. His struggle to reinvent his style with practically each new film has always been bound up with his wrestling with questions of artistic freedom and integrity. In this sense, he has evolved steadily over the years into a complete artist of poetry and prose, a lyrical sleepwalker whose social conscience has always remained wide awake.
(*) Deborah Young reviews films for VARIETY in Rome
