Film review

  • Fists in the Pocket

    Old YorkerFilm review

    I pugni in tasca

    Marco Bellocchio (1965)

    Watching Fists in the Pocket was disorienting in several ways.  At first, the dialogue sounded post-recorded – voices speaking at the same volume regardless of where the people moving their mouths appeared in the frame.  (Whether this changed or I got used to it and stopped noticing, I’m not sure.)  The print shown by BFI had the eccentric habit of occasionally including French as well as English subtitles.  More important, the quick editing and seeming disconnection of the opening scenes meant that it took a few minutes to get your bearings.  Once you do get them, you’re borne along by the brio and confidence of Marco Bellocchio’s remarkable debut feature, made when he was in only his mid-twenties, though his macabre satire on family ties is always as much unnerving as it’s bracing.

    The film is set in post-war Emilia-Romagna and principally in a country villa, where three brothers and a sister live with their blind mother (Liliana Gerace).  The daughter Giulia (Paola Pitagora) and the two younger sons, Alessandro (Lou Castel) and Leone (Pier Luigi Troglio) all suffer from epilepsy.  The look of the villa suggests old money and declining fortunes.  The eldest son Augusto (Marino Masé), sole provider for the family, exerts a degree of independence denied the others:  he has, as well as a car and a job, a fiancée, Lucia (Jeannie McNeil).  Even so, Augusto’s freedom remains limited by his mother and siblings, one of whom decides that the solution is for all four of them to die.  An expression of the plan forming in Alessandro’s mind comes when his mother asks him to read her the daily paper:  he invents morbid headlines and mimes attacking her.  He then turns infantile, laying his head in his mother’s lap before starting away as soon as she starts to return his display of affection.  That sudden shift anticipates the successive failures of nerve that Alessandro suffers in what follows.  The failures express his ambivalence about what he thinks he needs to do.  The ambivalence reflects the strength of blood ties and the protagonist’s persisting desire to gain access to what he sees as normal adult life.

    Alessandro takes driving lessons with a view to carrying out his plan (though also, perhaps less consciously, with a view to emulating his elder brother’s lifestyle).  He fails the test but pretends he’s passed and persuades Augusto to let him drive the car on one of the household’s periodic outings to the cemetery where the paterfamilias is buried.  Augusto, relieved of driving duties, stays at home, where he discovers a note his brother has left him, announcing Alessandro’s intention to crash the car and kill everyone in it.  In the event, he can’t go through with it and the party returns in one piece.  A while later, though, Alessandro takes his mother out alone; when they make a brief stop, he guides her towards the edge of a cliff, from which she falls to her death.  Following her funeral, he administers an overdose of epilepsy medication to Leone and, once the boy loses consciousness, drowns him in his bath.  The early scenes suggest that Alessandro and Giulia are at daggers drawn; as the plot develops, their kinship emerges as emotionally the closest, perhaps incestuous.  Soon after Giulia realises Alessandro caused the other deaths, he has the opportunity to suffocate Giulia as she lies unconscious in bed.  He hesitates and is lost.  He suffers an epileptic fit and calls in vain for Giulia’s help.  It’s true his cries are muffled in competition with a Verdi aria playing in the same room but you get the sense that his sister, who has regained consciousness, wouldn’t help him even if she could.  Alessandro’s fit appears to be fatal, the moral of the story that surviving your family demands a killer instinct.

    Or the mid-twentieth-century Italian family at any rate:  Fists in the Pocket is very much of its time and place.  Bellocchio told Sight & Sound (Winter 1967-1968) that the film was ‘autobiographical in its description of a milieu which I had to get away from in order to survive’.  There’s a strong whiff of eugenics in Alessandro’s notion that life would be improved without a vulnerable, needy parent and a brother who is not just the worst affected by epilepsy but looks to be mentally retarded.  This attitude implies a legacy of 1930s fascist philosophy (albeit that Mussolini made conflicting statements about eugenics).  The Roman Catholic rites – whether grace at the family dining table or a priest’s funeral oration – are played with a straight face that makes them seem all the more farcical.  After their mother’s death, Alessandro and Giulia embark on an ecstatic destruction of her possessions and mementos.  Alessandro takes the lead in this:  the moment when he destroys an ancestor’s portrait by putting his knee through the canvas is almost literally iconoclastic.

    The film, though often funny, is occasionally poignant – for example, when Alessandro accompanies Augusto into the city for Lucia’s birthday party and we see how socially inept and scared the younger man is.  This is a case where clarity of the authorial voice is able to unify shifts in tone and result in a genuine black comedy.  Bellocchio is greatly assisted in this by Alberto Marrama’s stylish black-and-white photography and, especially, by Ennio Morricone’s protean score, in which angelic voices turn to dissonance then to plaintive melody, and back again.   Fists in the Pocket is a case too of plot invention and character development easily eclipsing the symbolic elements of the set-up – the house’s decadent atmosphere and routines, the unseeing parent, the disabled offspring.   Lou Castel’s stocky, solid presence makes Alessandro more distinctive (and affecting) than a more willowy, neurasthenic actor might have been in the role.  His sudden bursts of movement and energy – Alessandro’s behaviour is in every sense fitful – have a dynamism that comes from within the actor.  Alessandro’s partnership with Paola Pitagora’s Giulia – who is willowy, but sly and avid too – is much more disarming than that of the kinky brother and sister in Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles.

    Marino Masé is rather fatuously handsome as Augusto but this works well too:  it helps to stop the audience asking, at least while the film is going on, why the oldest brother, with written notice of Alessandro’s intentions, doesn’t do more to prevent his acting on them.  In retrospect, you wonder if Augusto’s lack of intervention illustrates that he too thinks getting rid of the others is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  According to the Senses of Cinema website, ‘Clenched inside a pocket, a hand outgrows the space designed to contain it’.   This obviously explains Bellocchio’s choice of title, even if, in English, it sounds stilted.  (Perhaps the Italian phrase is idiomatic.)   But little else in this extraordinary piece is lost in translation.

    1 July 2018

  • Leave No Trace

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Debra Granik (2018)

    Debra Granik takes her time between projects.  Leave No Trace is only the second dramatic feature she’s made since her debut with Down to the Bone in 2004, and her first since 2010.   A documentary, Stray Dog, appeared in 2014, halfway through the eight-year interval between Winter’s Bone and this new film.  Leave No Trace has some similarities to its widely admired predecessor.   Granik wrote the screenplay with Anne Rosellini and adapted it from a recent novel (in this case, My Abandonment by Peter Rock, first published in 2009).  A teenage girl is again the central character, although thirteen-year-old Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) is several years younger than Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly.  Both heroines, thanks largely to the actions of their fathers, live an existence far removed from conventional comfort and security.  Yet differences between the two films are more striking.

    Leave No Trace is a two- rather than one-character study:  the paterfamilias absent throughout Winter’s Bone is very present here, in the shape of Tom’s father Will (Ben Foster).  Where Ree’s family circumstances, including her father’s criminality, were typical of the economically deprived community Granik described, Tom’s situation is dictated by the unusually and determinedly anti-social behaviour of a father who, within the limits of their curious lifestyle, loves and cares for his daughter.  Will, a widower, has taken responsibility for Tom’s schooling in essential academic subjects as well as in the practical skills their modus vivendi requires.  Father and daughter live in isolation in what is technically parkland in Portland, Oregon but which, to any urban viewer, looks like wilderness.  Will and Tom’s habitat is very different from the drained-of-colour Ozarks world of Winter’s Bone:  the natural light and verdure of the opening scenes, as captured by the cinematographer Martin McDonough, are close to paradisal.

    Debra Granik describes the forest-dwellers’ routines of foraging for and cooking food though they’re not without funds:  they walk into Portland to shop at a supermarket and back out again.  They’ll pitch camp in the tent they share at night (without the least suggestion that the arrangement is anything but innocent).  After a while, they’ll move on to another part of the area (leaving no trace in the spot they left behind).  There’s next to no backstory.   We know that Will has seen military action – he goes to a veterans’ hospital in Portland to collect medication (which he sells on, to another vet living rough) – but not where or when he fought.  We don’t know how long he and Tom have been living in the woods, though there’s no indication that she remembers anything different.  She expresses regret that she can’t remember her other parent and asks her father what her mother’s favourite colour was.  Will tells her then asks which colour is Tom’s favourite.  (The answer to both questions is yellow.)  The actors suggest this conversation is one that their characters have had before and enjoy repeating occasionally.

    Their way of life seems settled but it can’t, of course, last.  Rangers discover Will and Tom, remind them it’s illegal to live on public land and temporarily separate them, before social services house them together in a rural community, where Tom goes to school and Will is given a job felling Christmas trees.  This can’t last either – Will needs to return to isolation and Tom follows – but the episode proves pivotal in having showing her the possibility and appeal of a different kind of existence.  Their return to the woods, in adverse weather, is gruelling for Tom.  Shortly afterwards, Will is injured in a fall.  Thanks to his daughter’s presence of mind, they’re taken in by denizens (including other veterans) of a trailer park.  Once Will has recovered from his injury, he wants to move on again but this time Tom digs her heels in.   ‘What’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me’, she tells her father.  He admits that he knows it.  Though he doesn’t say as much, he knows too that he’s depriving his daughter for selfish reasons.  Leave No Trace ends with their separation, as Will goes back literally under cover.  The wilderness is still beautiful to look at but that’s ot why he has to be there.

    This new film is less dramatically eventful than Winter’s Bone and Tom’s journey is lower-key than Ree’s but Debra Granik strikes a good balance of keeping the story going with a reasonable amount of incident while ensuring the dialogue and acting don’t break out of the realistic frame she creates.  After a disappointing performance in The Program (2015) and an inevitably limited one in Hell or High Water (2016), Ben Foster is very good here:  his closed-off intensity is right for Will.  Foster hints definitely but economically at the source of this man’s need to be (nearly) alone.  His urgent, startled reaction to the noise of a helicopter overhead probably reflects his memories of warfare though it could just signal Will’s wary alertness to the approach of any forces he instinctively sees as threatening to his solitariness.  Even if battle trauma (rather than widowerhood) is the root problem, Will has been changed by war in a way Leave No Trace’s less unsociable vets have not.  Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, sixteen when the film was shot, is no less emotionally alert, in a very different register.  She’s especially good at realising Tom’s experience of things for the first time – with a lovely, hopeful curiosity.  She touchingly expresses how the girl starts to see familiar things in a different light.

    The sounds of machinery that interferes with nature, whether it belongs to the park rangers or the Christmas tree farmer (Jeff Kober) who employs Will, are ominous but Granik is more interested in her characters than in conveying obvious environmental messages.  She similarly avoids turning people into goodies and baddies.  The representatives of social services are decent and sensitive, as is a church pastor.   Dale Dickey, remarkably different from the frightening figure she was in Winter’s Bone, is excellent as a shrewdly humane, motherly woman in the trailer park community.   Beautifully lit as it is, I could have done without the repeated image of a spider’s web that turns out to be symbolic.  I have to admit I still wish this director could lighten up a little more.  But Leave No Trace is more nuanced than Winter’s Bone and Debra Granik’s third feature an impressive piece of work.

    29 June 2018

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