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1965, NR, 108 Minutes

Available from the Criterion Collection

Overview: Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket begins with a ransom note sent by the ravishing, lonely, desperate Giulia to her brother's fiancee, which jealously threatens their impending marriage. It's an apt opening: throughout the course of the film, another brother will kill two of his family members, flirt with and caress his sister, taunt and torment a young neighbor boy, and majestically burn all of his deceased mother's possessions. It all culminates in an epileptic swan song (maybe?) on his bedroom floor.

Described as an "ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values," Fists in the Pocket truly is a gleeful decimation of wholesomeness, the most perverse disbanding of family ties since Norman Bates hid away his mother's corpse in the fruit cellar. Set in a mountaintop villa perpetually surrounded by mist, the film is a veritable combustion of psychoanalytic maladies. Hidden beneath a semblance of normality, the most lucid member of the family is the mentally-challenged younger brother, who bemusedly and mutely witnesses his siblings' breakdown.

Alberto Marrama's black-and-white cinematography calmly peruses the villa's imposing hallways and overarching walls; there are barely any interior shots that allow the audience to view the whole space, constantly plaguing us with the possibility that something unseen is threatening the characters. This is true, of course - the most threatening spaces in Fists in the Pocket are certainly mental ones. In the troubling lead role, Lou Castel gives a mad, brilliant performance that's funny, terrifying, unsettling, and poignant, a rebellion in the face of familial tradition and upper-class malaise, and a perfect representation of Bellocchio's mood of subversive dread.

Features: Video interviews with Lou Castel, Marco Bellocchio, Paola Pitagora, editor Silvano Agosti, and critic Tullio Kezich; introduction by Bernardo Bertolucci; original theatrical trailer; booklet featuring an article by Deborah Young and an interview with Bellocchio.

Final Word: In his introduction, Bertolucci cites Pier Paolo Pasolini's conception of films being split into the "cinema of poetry" and the "cinema of prose," with his own Before the Revolution representing the former and Fists in the Pocket representing the latter. I disagree. Fists in the Pocket has an overwhelming mad poetry to it, reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" - an irrepressible cry of outrage, boredom, and desperation. Forty-one years later, it's still a hell of a rush. The Criterion DVD makes Marrama's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's blistering score eerily clear; there is no escaping the (somehow relatable) insanity that permeates throughout the whole film.

Film: 5 of 5

DVD: 4 of 5

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