L’ora di religione (Il sorriso di mia madre)

Marco Bellocchio (2002)

Henry K Miller’s profile in this month’s Sight & Sound stresses Marco Bellocchio’s abiding preoccupations during a film-making career that now spans half a century.  Bellocchio’s main themes, which Miller defines as ‘the performance of normality; the toll taken on those who can’t or won’t achieve it, and the bad faith of those who do’, are ‘all there in his first two films Fists in the Pocket (1965) and China is Near (1967)’.  The lack of change in Bellocchio’s concerns is ‘itself a critique of a culture in stasis’.  My Mother’s Smile supports Miller’s argument.   The hero of this satirical drama is Ernesto Picciafuocco (Sergio Castellito), an artist and a confirmed atheist, who learns with horror that the Vatican is considering his late mother for canonisation.  The persisting tyranny of the Catholic Church and the pathological handcuffs of family are as central to this film as they were to Bellocchio’s mid-1960s work.  The tone, though, is different – bleaker and more coldly angry – except for a couple of elements that suggest a further change of heart:  Bellocchio in his mid-sixties is more anxious than he was in his twenties to find consolations.

The first and last scenes of My Mother’s Smile both feature Ernesto’s young son Leonardo (Alberto Mondini).   At the start, the boy (he’s perhaps nine or ten – I’m not a good judge of children’s ages) is in the garden at home, watched by his mother Irene (Jacqueline Lustig) through a window.  Leonardo is talking to himself and gesticulating vigorously, ordering an invisible interlocutor to leave him alone.  When Irene comes out to ask what he’s doing, the boy explains that he’s telling God to go away.  Leonardo has recently learned in a religious education class at school that God is everywhere and sees all.  Leonardo hates the knowledge that he’ll never be free of God.   The child’s outburst of anti-theism gets the film off to a strong start yet he never again seems anguished.  Although Leonardo’s parents are separated, he still sees plenty of his father.  In their several conversations about religion, it’s Ernesto who’s troubled by and hostile towards it.  Alberto Mondini plays Leonardo naturally and with a lot of charm and Bellocchio increasingly presents him as a delightful emblem of hope for the future.  In the closing sequence, Ernesto takes Leonardo to school and the boy runs off enthusiastically to join other kids.  His father, in the final shot of My Mother’s Smile, watches him lovingly.

Leonardo is also responsible for setting in motion the other less pessimistic strand of Bellocchio’s story.  Angered by what his son is being told in religious education classes, Ernesto goes to the school to have words with the teacher concerned.  She is the beautiful Diana Sereni (Chiara Conti) and Ernesto is instantly infatuated with her, though when he mentions her good looks to Leonardo, the boy is amused:  the ugliness of his class’s RE teacher, he tells his father, is a standing joke.  It’s debatable whether there are two different teachers and Ernesto sees the one who doesn’t teach Leonardo, or whether Diana is Ernesto’s fantasy.  Some of his encounters with her certainly have the quality of hallucinations.  In either case, Diana, like Leonardo (and as her surname suggests), does Ernesto good – in sharp contrast to the rest of his family, the Vatican’s intervention in his life, and the synergy of the two.

Bellocchio builds their malignant combination cleverly.  Ernesto first receives news of the Vatican’s deliberations from an emissary (Bruno Cariello) who is allowed to be sensitive and likeable.  The emissary represents Cardinal Piumini (Maurizio Donadoni):  in Ernesto’s subsequent interview with him Bellocchio gives the cardinal‘s cunning intelligence its due.  The furious antipathy to the Church that Bellocchio shares with his protagonist accumulates gradually, in illustrations of the Vatican’s rituals and exploitation of those who need to believe – or have needs of a different kind.  Ernesto’s mother’s piety was exceptional in the Picciafuocco clan which, like the family in Fists in the Pocket, have seen both economically better days and matricide.  In My Mother’s Smile, the title character has died at the hand of Ernesto’s mentally disturbed brother Egidio (Donato Placido).  The exact circumstances of the killing are as crucial as attestations of the mother’s post-mortem miracle-working in deciding whether canonisation is a possibility.  If she was killed while she was sleeping, she fails the ‘heroic virtue’ criterion and the process can go no further.  If, as other members of the family are suggesting, she died as the result of pleading with Egidio to stop blaspheming, she can be considered a martyr and as a candidate for sainthood.

Bellocchio scornfully pinpoints the vested interests of Ernesto’s two other brothers (Gigio Alberti and Gianfelice Imparato), their cynically clear-sighted aunt (Piera Degli Esposti) and Leonardo’s mother, who thinks that a saint in the family will help the boy’s prospects in the longer term.  The aunt describes religious belief as an ‘insurance policy on the afterlife’; the family’s virtual cost-benefit analysis of canonisation has a distinctly this-worldly ring.  Ernesto is informed of the process a full three years after it’s begun.  I didn’t understand how the process had reached what the Church people call its second stage if the question of how the mother died hadn’t been resolved but that’s presumably inattention on my part rather than carelessness on Bellocchio’s:  if his plot didn’t stick to the letter of the Vatican law, it would dilute the satirical force of the film.   (I should say that I struggled to maintain the concentration Bellocchio demands of the viewer and to keep up with the dialectical flow – more specifically, the fast-moving subtitles.)

Sergio Castellito stands out in a capable cast but theophobia and mother-phobia have the starring roles in My Mother’s Smile.  Ernesto remembers the potential saint as a woman lacking in affection, her ‘lethal, indifferent smile of being a mother’ insisting on the gratitude of the children to whom she gave life.  Bellocchio also summons an array of supporting bugbears, ranging from a cultural hangover like swordplay to the artist’s persecution by commercial imperatives.  The swords are innocuous in Leonardo’s fencing lesson, bizarrely dangerous in a dawn duel in which Ernesto gets involved.  He saves his skin thanks to incompetence so evident and despicable that his antiquated royalist opponent Conte Bulla (Toni Bertorelli) decides the younger man just isn’t worth harming.  Ernesto supplements the money he makes from his paintings by illustrating children’s books.   In an early scene, he receives an fax responding to his proposed drawings for an edition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  The publisher angrily demands ‘More children and lots more rats!’   Twice in My Mother’s Smile, at opposite ends of the film, Ernesto in his studio edits an image of a grand building on his computer screen.  I wasn’t sure if the building was specifically the Vatican but there’s no doubt that it stands on pillars of the establishment.  The second time Ernesto edits the image he erases the building entirely.

22 July 2018