De Punhos Cerrados

The first time I saw Fists in the Pocket, I was 7 or 8 years old and I thought the film was a horror movie because of its gruesome subject matter. It had freaked me a lot then. Today, after viewing it for the first time in its entirety, and though I don't think the film can be considered to be an all and out horror flick, I still think there's enough gruesome and eerie qualities to this drama to call it an authentic neo-horror film. A horror film with intelligence. Unlike Hitchcock (no, I'm not saying his films aren't intelligent) or the plethora of other less subtle horror films, where the horror or terror is mostly obvious and played for thrills to manipulate an audience, in Fists the disturbing aspects aren't played out for thrills. They're there to show the sad situation in which the characters exist. Because of this, the film has a true morbid atmosphere, quasi-Gothic in nature, that permeates it from beginning to end. The characters inability to see the horrifying things they do or think (for most part of the narrative) makes this film absolutely unique in film history. It's a vivid "intimate" portrait of a dysfunctional family that's almost a cerebral horror film.

Simply put, it's brilliant!

The actors are all excellent but Lou Castel's performance as the frustrated, crazed, death obsessed brother is mesmerizing. You can't take your eyes off him. And even though it was made in 1965, the film feels contemporary, mainly because of its refusal to amplify and exploit it shocking aspects or the characters' foibles to heights of schlock or melodrama. Plus, the fluid direction gives this morbid drama (which could have easily been heavy and static) a deceptively "normal" quality which works perfectly and adds even more to all of the characters' sad state of mind. The film is equally claustrophobic and expansive; claustrophobic with the (very) tight interiors and the family drama that (like one of the characters of the film wants to do) makes you want to break free and escape at all cost; and expansive because of the Italian countryside that surrounds these doomed characters. The scenery, natural and man-made, is a character of its own, seemingly symbolizing the characters precipitous existence but also overwhelmingly vast, stark and crushing, dwarfing the already tightly-knit family down to minuscule size, which then heightens their already claustrophobic existence that much more. Ennio Morricone's score is characteristically moody & chilling and complements the film perfectly.

Fists in the Pocket is a very earthy, grounded, morbid & blunt portrait of a doomed family! A must-see for those who love "pure" cinema.

The family in Marco Bellocchio's startling debut "Fists in the Pocket" make the Femms of "The Old Dark House" seem normal. These indolent Italians laze around all day taunting each other at every opportunity while son Allessandro, (a truly terrific Lou Castel), contemplates the best ways to rid himself of the others, including his blind mother, for the sake of the one brother he cares about. This darkly funny satire wasn't like other Italian films of the time, taking an almost putrid look at the family values Italians hold most dear; a comedy about matricide, fratricide and possible incest that actually manages to be quite touching at times. It's also a movie that takes its time. For a director making only his first feature, Bellocchio bravely put narraitve on the back-burner opting instead for an atmosphere as lazy as his characters and killing off a number of sacred cows in the process. The Establishment hated it while young critics loved it though not enough to make it anything other than a cult movie and it's seldom revived. Perhaps its reputation outweighs its numerous qualities but however you look at it, it's a one-off and well worth seeing.

This first effort by writer/director Marco Bellocchio has been called a drama by some, and a horror film by others. It is both. It is neither.

It is a view of a dysfunctional family. I almost had the impression they cam from a long line of incest like The People Under the Stairs. One wants to get away, another has epilepsy, the mother is blind, one seems to be developmentally disabled, and the last, Giulia (Paola Pitagora)is really not classifiable, but she sure seems to spend a lot of time very close to her brother Ale (Lou Castel).

Ale feels sorry for his older brother, Augusto (Marino Masé) and hatches a plan to drive the rest of the family, including himself off a cliff so his brother can get on with his life.

His plan fails, so he starts doing them in one by one.

Watching him is mesmerizing. You just have to see what he is going to try next. In the meantime, the family just acts as crazy as you would expect.

Bellocchio went on to direct many more great films including A Leap in the Dark, The Prince of Homburg, and The Religion Hour. It is amazing his first was so good.

Beautifully filmed, with nice cinematography and camera movements, mostly in indoor footage, the novienis also interesting in its unique subject. While the development of the story is perhaps too slow in the beginning (although with some grat scenes), the film becomes incrisingly disturbing. Hatred for family, order and tradition is portrayed as aiming a final solution - if you understand what I mean... All members of the family (in different ways, all of them are overly self-centred) are well developped in their dysfunctional relationship, phisically represented in blindness, intellectual disability and epilepsy. Curiously, a "handicapped" himself is moved by a creepy cleansing impulse. Even his closest person, his beautiful sister, with whom he has a complicity relatiinship, is not out of danger.

When this film first appeared in the 1960s, the effect was so startlingly individual: there had never been a film as bold, as seemingly unhinged, yet as ruthlessly controlled, as this first feature by Marco Bellocchio. The wonderfully atmospheric black-and-white cinematography seemed to be developed from some dingy dream which dared to bring out into the open the most heinous family secrets, yet the utterly dispassionate fury which animated the most frenzied sequences was so freakish it was almost funny. This constant tension somehow allowed for a sneaky kind of compassion to enter the movie, so that the family dynamics, though extreme, seemed to come out of a common nightmare. FISTS IN THE POCKET remains an embattled cry for a new society, by focusing on the remnants of the diseased upper classes, yet this tale of sound and fury seems to have been made in the kind of frenzied reverie that is analogous to the stream-of-conscious jumble which William Faulkner used at the beginning of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, and to the same effect, i.e., to chart a family's disintegration as a mirror to the decaying grandeur of a dying society.