As Godard's Breathless was to French cinema, a stylish rupture with the past featuring a nihilistic lead character, so is Fists in the Pocket to Italian cinema. There is a certain visual appeal to this film, Lou Castel turns in a fine performance, and the score from Ennio Morricone finds a way to fit its bizarre story. Unfortunately, it's unpleasant to watch the main character's misdirected (and never particularly justified) rage explode. I believe director Marco Bellocchio's intention with the story was to satirize some of Italy's institutions, like family and the church, but I don't think he was all that successful because he spends most of his time on a deeply dysfunctional family.
Bellocchio gives us a cartoonishly distorted bourgeois family, one with incest, epilepsy, a learning disability, and blindness. The adult children behave like animals at the dinner table and know no boundaries. It's as if you see Bellocchio's mind work at trying to throw everything he could into creating the bizarre, claustrophobic, and insulated world they inhabit, referencing among other things Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible. The fact that he used disabilities and mental illness as part of this is problematic to me, and the film would have been much more powerful without them.
The young man with pent-up rage (hence, fists in pocket) wants to f* his sister (and his brother's fiancée), throws his blind mother off a cliff, and then proceeds to trash his family's ancestral belongings. He is a combination of (literally) burn-it-all-down nihilism with some kind of mental illness, which didn't lead to any profound revelations. In the film's best scene, we get a glimpse of his alienation. He's at a party, with other young people dancing in sync, and he's awkward and isolated. If only there had been more of this kind of thing, or if he had some kind of humanizing virtues. As it was, it's more about the shock value of a completely unlikeable murderous epileptic. I liked the style of this one, but not the substance, and was glad when it was over.
Bellocchio gives us a cartoonishly distorted bourgeois family, one with incest, epilepsy, a learning disability, and blindness. The adult children behave like animals at the dinner table and know no boundaries. It's as if you see Bellocchio's mind work at trying to throw everything he could into creating the bizarre, claustrophobic, and insulated world they inhabit, referencing among other things Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible. The fact that he used disabilities and mental illness as part of this is problematic to me, and the film would have been much more powerful without them.
The young man with pent-up rage (hence, fists in pocket) wants to f* his sister (and his brother's fiancée), throws his blind mother off a cliff, and then proceeds to trash his family's ancestral belongings. He is a combination of (literally) burn-it-all-down nihilism with some kind of mental illness, which didn't lead to any profound revelations. In the film's best scene, we get a glimpse of his alienation. He's at a party, with other young people dancing in sync, and he's awkward and isolated. If only there had been more of this kind of thing, or if he had some kind of humanizing virtues. As it was, it's more about the shock value of a completely unlikeable murderous epileptic. I liked the style of this one, but not the substance, and was glad when it was over.