Marco Bellocchio: A Leap in the Dark

While Bellocchio was shooting in Rome, Sardinia, Campania, and Lombardy, Karim Aïnouz was directing Rosebush Pruning in Spain. Starring Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts, Elena Anaya, and Pamela Anderson, Rosebush Pruning will be an adaptation of Bellocchio’s debut feature, Fists in the Pocket (1965), which Michael Koresky has called “a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values.” Lou Castel stars as the “rampaging id” of a formerly wealthy Italian family and delivers “one of those performances that not only enhances a film but defines it.”

Introducing Marco Bellocchio: A Leap in the Dark, the retrospective running in Toronto through January 29, TIFF programmer Andréa Picard writes that Fists “cuts to the heart of Bellocchio’s most pressing themes: family dysfunction; the morally complex allure of but also rejection of power; identity; and the desire to break free from conformism in its many guises.” Bellocchio’s filmography is “both resoundingly cohesive,” writes Picard, “yet also stylistically diverse; its breath encompasses early militant documentaries, biting satires and comedies of manners, adaptations (of Chekhov, Pirandello, Kleist), psychological character studies, television series, and historical dramas.”

On Friday, Piers Handling, TIFF’s former director and CEO, will introduce Bellocchio’s follow-up to Fists, the rarely screened China Is Near (1967), a film that “has the boudoir complications of a classic comic opera,” according to Pauline Kael. The story whirls around three aristocratic siblings: Vittorio, a professor running for municipal office on the Socialist ticket while dabbling in an affair with his secretary; Elena, who’s sleeping with Vittorio’s campaign manager; and seventeen-year-old Camillo, a seminary student flirting with Maoism.

Bellocchio was twenty-eight when he made China Is Near, and Kael suggested that “perhaps only a very young (or a very old) director can focus on such graceless, mean-spirited people with so much enjoyment. As the pairs of lovers combine and recombine and the five become one big ghastly family, Bellocchio makes it all rhyme.” Talking to Bellocchio for Film Comment in 2013, Max Nelson observed that he is “a searching, curious filmmaker, quick to confront the conflict between the Church and the radical Left and unwilling to align himself with either, drawing stylistically in equal measure from religious iconography and Hollywood melodramas.”

The Toronto series takes its name from A Leap in the Dark (1980), starring Michel Piccoli as a judge and Anouk Aimée as the older sister who raised him. Both leads won top acting awards in Cannes, and when the film screened at the Harvard Film Archive in 2014, the programmers noted that Bellocchio “introduces a new subtlety into his visual style; the film ‘murmurs,’ as he puts it, breaking with the grotesquerie and expressionism of his earlier work.” And Andréa Picard points out that when Andrei Tarkovsky saw A Leap in the Dark, he “asked its great cinematographer, Giuseppe Lanci, to shoot Nostalghia.”

Lanci also shot The Eyes, the Mouth (1982), which Bellocchio cowrote with Catherine Breillat. Lou Castel stars once again, here as as actor past his prime who returns home after his twin brother has killed himself—as Bellocchio’s own twin brother, Camillo, did in 1969, a tragedy Bellocchio revisited in his 2021 nonfiction feature, Marx Can Wait. When The Eyes, the Mouth arrived in the States, Vanity Fair’s Stephen Schiff called it “at once feverish and majestic; its characters keep scooting between damnation and transcendence.”

The Los Angeles Times’s Michael Wilmington found Devil in the Flesh (1986), an adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s 1923 novel about a teen’s infatuation with an older woman, to be “a good film, but not really a scandalous one—for all its radical politics and unabashed sexuality.” A single unsimulated sex scene got Devil slapped with an X rating, but for Wilmington, “what tends to be exciting in this film isn’t either sex, or romance, but aesthetic trappings: Giuseppe Lanci’s lucent cinematography; the saucy bite of Maruschka Detmers’s performance; the decor; the smooth, honeyed flow of images.”

In My Mother’s Smile (2002), Ernesto (Sergio Castellitto), an atheist, is informed by the Vatican that his late mother is a candidate for sanctification. “Bellocchio constructs Ernesto’s moral dilemma with evident relish, placing his character between a morass of hypocrisy and a yawning pit of childhood guilt,” writes Ben Sachs in the Chicago Reader. “The film’s chiaroscuro lighting and sumptuous imagery suggest the netherworlds Ernesto’s intellect so rigorously rejects.”

Vincere (2009) tells the story of Benito Mussolini’s use and abuse of his Austrian-born mistress, Ida Dalser, as he rose to power. For the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis, Vincere is “a sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.” At Slant, Kenji Fujishima calls Blood of My Blood (2015), a two-part film set in a rural convent prison first in the seventeenth century and then in the present day, an “unclassifiable, almost reality-defying mix of religious drama, supernatural fantasy, and whimsical comedy.”

The Traitor (2019) “clocks in at a relatively brisk two-and-a-half hours,” writes Molly Haskell for Film Comment, “but, as with its American counterpart, The Irishman, it spans continents and decades while casting a retrospective eye over the iniquities of the Cosa Nostra during one of its temporary if spectacular decimations. Dense and brooding, but, like Scorsese’s film, vigorously told, The Traitor also unfolds under the looming shadow of mortality, of time running out for aging kingpins, and of debts coming due.”

The complex series of events leading to the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 are “grippingly recounted” in the six-episode series Exterior Night (2022), found John Bleasdale when he spoke with Bellocchio for the Financial Times. “With an excellent cast—Fabrizio Gifuni is superb as Moro and Toni Servillo plays Pope Paul VI, a friend of Moro’s—and more twists than a bowl of fusilli, the series may do for Italian political thrillers what Gomorrah did for its gangsters. Each episode takes a different point of view—Moro’s own, that of his wife Eleonora, played by Margherita Buy, even that of the terrorists.”

Opening in 1858 Bologna, Kidnapped (2023) retraces the true story of the abduction of a six-year-old Jewish boy on the orders of the Pope himself. Bellocchio’s latest completed feature “scathingly portrays the Catholic Church as dogmatically uncompromising and cruel, all while its power was besieged by the secularizing threats of Italian unification,” writes Daniel Kasman in the Notebook. “Although the film is rooted in this specific era, this historical example of youthful indoctrination and radicalization feels bracingly contemporary.” Marco Bellocchio is “one of the last virtuosos of classical cinematic storytelling left standing, and Kidnapped is a forceful example of both populist and political filmmaking.”