55 years of the Fists in the Pocket
On July 31, 1965, the film "I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)" premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival.
This film was the first full-length feature film by the 26-year-old graduate of the Rome Experimental Film Center and listener of the highest London film courses Marco Bellocchio. The young director made this debut film with the money he borrowed from his brother - 50 million lire or 80 thousand dollars.
At the Locarno Film Festival, the film was awarded the Silver Sail Prize. (Since 1968, the Locarno Festival Prizes have been renamed from Sails to Leopards: Gold, Silver, Bronze.)
A few days later, the film "I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)" was presented at the Venice International Film Festival. At this festival, the film of the young filmmaker did not participate in the competition for the main prizes, especially since among the contestants were such masterpieces as "Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa... (Sandra)" by Luchino Visconti, "Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde)" by Milos Forman, "Pierrot le Fou" by Jean-Luc Godard, "Akahige 赤ひげ (Red Beard)" by Akira Kurosawa, "Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert)" by Luis Buñuel, "Застава Ильича (I Am Twenty)" by Marlen Khutsiev and others. But on the other hand, Bellocchio's film received the Award of the City of Imola, awarded to novice and promising artists.
The film by Marco Bellocchio did not receive any other serious festival awards, but it laid the foundation for a whole direction in European cinema, which was called "contest cinema" or, more simply, "rebellious cinema". Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov sees a manifestation of rebellion in the very title of the film, which, formally, has nothing to do with the content of the film. Moreover, according to Nefedov, the expression "fists in the pocket" is close in meaning to the Russian expression "fig in the pocket", but reflects a much more powerful negativism towards the surrounding reality.
Numerous reviews of film critics, generally very positive, define the meaning and genre of the film in very different ways. Someone refers this film to family dramas, someone - to criminal dramas, someone - to horror, and Kinopoisk generally called it "a tragicomedy about a family of crazy epileptics." In our opinion, there is not a single gram of comedy in this film. And to see in the content of the film solely a description of the "family of crazy epileptics" intellectually is tantamount to seeing in Milos Forman's masterpiece "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" solely a description of methods of treating mental illness.
In our opinion, the closest to revealing the author's intention, which, by the way, lies literally on the surface and is accessible to any adequate moviegoer, is Stanislav Lugovoi, who defined the film genre as an allegorical film and wrote in his article from 2019: "The entire allegorism of "I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)" fits into a simple thing: a blind mother - is native Italy, not noticing anything either around herself or within society, busy only with touching memories of its former greatness and aspiration to control;
the prudent older brother is the Italian elite, who seeks to get the maximum from their homeland and safely dump where it is more comfortable, spitting on those who remain.
The younger defenseless moron brother is the silent majority, with whom you can do whatever you want, the people that are silent (Leon will say only one phrase for the whole film).
The father, who, consider, made all the mess, is absent - what is not a hint of the totalitarian past in the face of the fascist regime and the Duce. And Alessandro is the very minority, capable of rebellion, subject to narcissism and numerous complexes, dreaming of finishing off the dilapidated mother Italy, perching feet on her coffin, ripping off the veils from the Italian elite, punishing the people for stupid silence by drowning him in the bathroom and voluntarily bringing himself into sacrifice.
The incestuous allusions are perhaps just a tribute to the coming sexual revolution, always going hand in hand with the social revolution. "
Probably precisely because of its rebellious content, this film was not shown in the Soviet Union. And this despite the fact that in the 60s Marco Bellocchio was an active participant in the Italian communist movement.
Despite the fact that the movement of the "contest cinema" has long faded away, modern cinema audiences have highly appreciated this film of Marco Bellocchio. 63% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave the film an 8-10 rating. Taking this into account and the above, rating of the "I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket)" according to FilmGourmand is 8.2, making it 471st in the Golden Thousand.
