There are several highlights for audiences in Marx Can Wait (Marx può aspettare), a film that the 82-year-old Marco Bellocchio perhaps waited too long to make. One of them is surely the director-narrator’s memory of the last conversation he had with his 29-year-old twin brother, Camillo. It was the fateful year of student protests 1968 and Marco, already celebrated on the world stage for his early films, had decided he didn’t want to be a bourgeois artist. Unaware of the depths of his brother’s unhappiness and despair, he gave him a lecture on becoming a revolutionary and serving the people as a way out of his personal problems. To which Camillo sadly demurred: “Marx can wait.”
This is one of the harrowing memories dredged up by Bellocchio and his four surviving siblings, all in their 80’s now, reunited for the filming in their family house in northern Italy – the same house where scenes from the director’s first feature, Fists in the Pocket (1965), were shot. Watching this reconstruction of an unhappy life through the lens of distant memory, aided by a few home movies and snapshots and bits and pieces from Bellocchio’s work, one has the feeling this is not really a documentary about a lost boy, but an autobiographical piece of self-analysis aimed at liberating its maker from a long-time thorn in the soul, an impression reinforced by the appearances of a psychoanalyst and a priest among the interviewees.
One’s second thought is how autobiographical Bellocchio’s fiction films are, and how they play off the family traumas of his childhood and youth.
After its premiere at Cannes, where Bellocchio received the honorary Palme d’Or for his long and fruitful career, Marx Can Wait is now showcasing in the Masters section at IDFA. Its cast of family members also appear in Sorelle Mai (2010), an episode film shot in the medieval town of Bobbio as part of the director’s annual filmmaking laboratory. Here their time-worn faces and vivid personalities animate interviews that otherwise might be on the tedious side.
The fact is that Camillo’s death happened fifty years ago and there are no startling revelations to make, no angles that the participants have not already explored obsessively over the course of a lifetime. The details, which are painstakingly teased out by Bellocchio’s questions to his two brothers and two sisters, are only news to the viewer. Thus we hear about their father’s illness and early death from cancer, which left their religion-obsessed mother to raise eight children on her own.
Camillo seems to have been timid and withdrawn from the start, besieged by melancholy and feelings of inferiority that only grew when Marco and his older brother, literary critic Piergiorgio, became famous in their fields. Blond and athletic in photos, Camillo was perhaps the best-looking of the siblings, but a poor student who couldn’t find a career path. His job as a phys ed teacher brought him no joy, and one day during the Christmas holidays his mother and sister found him in the gym, where he had hanged himself.
All this is revealed to the audience against a background of historical events and, most interestingly, snatches of scenes from Bellocchio’s films which we can see are clearly exploring his family traumas, particularly his mother’s slavish attachment to Catholic doctrine (she is distraught at the idea of Camillo suffering “hell fire” for taking his life, just as she was upset at her dying husband sending the priest away from his bedside.) The wall-size blow-up of her gentle girlish face obsesses the hero of His Mother’s Smile, but long before that, the blind mother in Fists in the Pocket set a dangerous psychological course for her children, particularly for the morbid and amoral brother and sister protagonists.
Bellocchio courageously exposes himself as he delves into the mystery of his twin’s suicide, blaming himself for not having done something to prevent it, casting around for “who is responsible” in his highly competitive family, hungrily filming the cerebral consolation of a psychologist and even a Jesuit priest, who has been called in for who knows what deep-seated reason. Piergiorgio is on the same intellectual wavelength as Marco; his brother Alberto is a little more direct. But it is his sister Letizia (who always appears with Maria Luisa at her side) who lends the film its touch of humanity. A deaf mute who has taught herself to speak, albeit with difficulty, Letizia is the most expressive of the lot in recounting her reactions to what she has seen. She was the sister who accompanied their mother to the gym where Camillo was found. It was she who cut him down and laid him on the floor. And it is she who says that she doesn’t want to see God or the saints when she dies, just Camillo and the rest of her relatives.
The scenes are smoothly joined in Francesca Calvelli’s editing while the lovely score by talented composer Ezio Bosso, who passed away last year, runs a gamut of moods as it brings to mind the landscape of Bellocchio’s films. The film’s cinematographers Michele Cherchi Palmieri and Paolo Ferreri capture both the warmth of close family ties and the emptiness of distance and absence with cooler tones. The most memorable image is the conclusive shot of the director walking on an old bridge away from the cloudy medieval skyline of Bobbio, until a boy in a phys ed tracksuit jogs past him, and Bellocchio turns back to stare. Such a simple metaphor to close on, and so effective.
Director, screenwriter: Marco Bellocchio
Producers: Simone Gattoni, Beppe Caschetto
Co-producers: Malcom Pagani, Moreno Zani
Executive producers: Alessio Lazzareschi, Michel Merkt
Cinematography: Michele Cherchi Palmieri, Paolo Ferreri
Editing: Francesca Calvelli
Production design: Andrea Castorina
Costumes: Daria Calvelli
Music: Ezio Bosso
Production companies: Kavac, IBC Movies, Tenderstories (Italy) in association with RAI Cinema
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: IDFA (Masters)
91 minutes
