My first viewing of Fists in the Pocket occurred a couple weeks ago, following hard on the heels of my previous post here re: Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. As it turned out, other priorities prevented me from writing up this review more quickly, so I've had this dark, disturbing and deeply fascinating film lingering in my mind ever since then. For a pair of movies released in the same country less than 10 days apart in 1965, the contrast in style and attitude could hardly be more jarring. Whereas Juliet is a vividly whimsical, brightly colored, grandiose and flamboyant indulgence of its director's hyperactive dream life (projected onto the consciousness of his surface-compliant but subtly obstinate wife Giulietta Masina), Fists is an eruption of wickedly callous youthful cynicism, filmed in stark black and white with a no-name cast that seemed to take a special delight in staging one provocative gesture of defiance after another. Despite the close proximity in space and time of the two films' origins, there is of course one major difference between the two, that being the generations into which their respective directors were born.
Separated by nearly 20 years of life experience between himself and the undisputed king of Italian cinema at that time, Fists in the Pocket's director Marco Bellocchio professed in 1967 that he inevitably felt "boredom" within the first ten minutes of watching a Fellini film - and he made no distinction, felt no compulsion to pay any sort of homage to titles like 8 1/2, La dolce vita, La strada or whatever alternate masterpiece of his one may wish to cite. Bellocchio was in pure iconoclast mode in that interview, included in the Criterion DVD liner notes, ripping on Visconti, shrugging off Rossellini, offering a condescending nod in Antonioni's general direction and writing off the whole of American film as "dead." In short, he was happy to draw and quarter just about any sacred cow of bourgeois respectability set before him in that heady era where old cinematic traditions were being pulled down and a new emerging breed of young auteurs were carving out their own rebellious niche.
That brash, cocky sentiment, coupled with a retrospective analysis of all the generational upheavals that were being triggered in late '65 and about to come to fruition over the next few years, lends itself to regarding Fists in the Pocket as a harbinger of all the protests and tumult we associate with the latter half of that turbulent decade. There's certainly no shortage of symbolic gestures or rowdy attitudes that one could point to over the course of the film in order to back up that hypothesis, but it's just as apparent that Bellocchio himself was not intending to point the way forward as a spokesman of his generation or exploit what he perceived as an imminent uprising of disaffected youth. Rather, in his portrait of an emotionally and morally crippled family living off the last vestiges of inherited wealth, Bellocchio was exorcising some of his own demons and acting out a process of contemptuous rejection of the corrupt morality that his elders sought to impose upon him and his peers. It hardly mattered that, at the time, he really had little in mind by way of a superior code of ethics or a more cogent scheme of how to successfully negotiate one's way through the wreckage of Italian life for those on the outer fringes of society, struggling to catch more than a distant glimpse of la dolce vita or merely fit in with the muddling mediocrity of middle class complacency. His characters Alessandro and Giulia in particular embody a form of alienation and distanced ennui that is at once less glamorous and more identifiable and compelling to many of us than the sleek, superhuman beauties forever enshrined in Antonioni's L'avventurra, La notte and L'eclisse.
With no apparent purpose of delivering a stirring or inspirational indictment of corruption meant to call us back to some foundation of moral principles a la the Neorealists who unashamedly appealed to some sense of shared sentimentality or human decency, Fists in the Pocket serves the function of introducing a note of discordant rupture between the past it rejects and the present moment it seeks to capture. Whether that defiant act is crystallized in our memory by a knee gleefully shoved through a portrait of a venerable deceased uncle, the forgery and destruction of an innocent student's report card, an impulsive bonfire fueled by discarded furniture no longer needed now that a recently deceased mother is out of the way, calisthenics performed over that same mother's casket even as she lays in repose, unambiguous tendencies toward sabotage and incest, explicitly realized matricidal and fratricidal urges, or any of the other myriad brutal mockeries that Bellocchio strings together for the sake of our collective outrage, amusement, or stupefied perplexity (pick one, or all three), there are bound to be moments that will startle and unnerve all but the most jaded viewers.
Alessandro's villainy is every bit as twisted as any killer ever conceived by Alfred Hitchcock, though he's lacking in malicious creativity - and that just makes him all the more disturbing. Likewise, Giulia's vanity and self-absorption only requires a few brief glimpses and a short moment of consideration to recognize that tantalizingly pretty, self-absorbed young people were just as prevalent and ubiquitous in the mid-1960s as they are in today's oft-maligned "millennial generation." It's probably true that Bellocchio and his peers did not have to go to the kind of explicit and nihilistic extremes that artists often find necessary today to generate that kind of shock among viewers, but I find the relatively subdued and direct realization of his disdain for tradition all the more effective and fascinating to watch because of it.
Next: Loves of a Blonde