Sometime in the late 1960s, Camilo Belocchio confessed to his twin brother Marco that he was dissatisfied with the flow of his life. Already a well-known filmmaker and devoted left, Marco, who was in charge of Jim, put himself into radical politics and comforted the “historic optimism” of the revolutionary proletarian revolution. I advised you to ask. Camilo suspected that his anguish could be healed by political involvement. “Marx can wait,” he told his brother. Shortly thereafter, Camilo died of suicide. He was 29 years old.
A fictional version of that conversation occurs in Marco Bellocchio’s 1982 movie “The Eyes, the Mouth.” The relevant clip will be inserted into his new documentary “Marco Can Wait”, along with other fragments from the director’s work. But even those unfamiliar with the personal and national history he explored in more than 20 films can be self-sufficient. It’s a complex and painful story, humane and sensitive.
Marco and Camilo were the youngest of eight children born to a bourgeois family in the small city of Piacenza in northern Italy. In 2016, one of the five surviving brothers, Marco, met with his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children for a reunion in their hometown. Filmed over the years, Marx Can Wait begins with a toast and table talk and is drawn to Camilo’s death black hole, illuminating a difficult and fascinating family heritage.
The family was Belocchio’s first great subject. His debut work, “Fist in pocket” Filmed in Piacenza (1965), it transforms domestic dysfunction, intergenerational frustration, and sibling resentment into a Gothic and cunning comedy.Award-winning at the Locarno Film Festival, “fist” and ferocious political satire “China is close” (1967) Bellocchio still in his twenties Enfant terrible In an Italian movie.
Manhattan’s IFC Center is showing those films Alongside “Marx can wait,” he takes a young man from the 1960s into a bitter dialogue with his older self. Belocchio’s career from that time to the present can be seen in part as a record of disillusionment, as revolutionary enthusiasm has replaced irony, compromise and defeat. His many films about Italian public figures and institutions — Mussolini; a violent, far-left red brigades. The Roman Catholic Church; and the Mafia — also a family story, paying attention to the intimate nuances of power and emotion.
The reverse is also true. “Marco Can Wait” is completely obsessed with the presence and absence of Belocchio’s brothers and sisters, their faces, voices and personalities, but by suggestion or penetration, it tells the story of Italy in the last half century. I feel it. Camilo’s fate is related to the expectation that a young man with his background will pursue stability and worldly success (family and career) or otherwise rebel in a dramatic and consequential way. increase. He has never found a way and seems desperate to find a way.
But suicide is probably not a mystery that can be solved by those closest to the victim. Marco and his brothers and sisters are particular about the details and speculate on the causes, such as the influence of Paolo, a mentally ill brother who shared a room with Camilo as a child, and the precarious presence of their reverent and emotionally demanding mother. To do. The suppressed memory foams and the secret is revealed, but nothing is solved. Freud can also wait.
Old photographs and film clips are regular documentary works, but the power of “Marx Can Wait” comes from the faces and voices of people in the 80’s who are trying to evoke and understand their young self. Marco’s brother Pier Giorgio and his deaf sister, Letizia, are particularly lively and pointed characters.
Folknerian chestnuts about the uneven past of the past are rarely explained by such vivid intimacy. The loss of Camilo continues and it is impossible to wrap, unravel or prun the family life like a vine. What makes this film tragic and at the same time soft is how its loss makes the family bloom in front of us.
Marx can wait
Unrated. Italian, with subtitles. Execution time: 1 hour 36 minutes. At the theater.
