Audience Member
Que filme profundamente triste, que família infeliz, que drama melancólico e depressivo, que atuações fortes e intensas, conseguem transmitir toda dor e desespero, toda bondade e altruísmo dúbio dos personagens... Marco, em sua obra, conseguiu transparecer toda a pureza e desespero dos acometidos de distúrbios, físicos ou psicológicos, a mazela de uma sociedade capacitismo e exclusão, obra divina.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
Full Review
dave s
Fists in the Pocket is an odd film, no matter how you look at it. It is a bleak and claustrophobic look at a family ravaged by physical infirmities and mental illness. Three brothers, a sister, and their mother live in a mountain villa in Italy. Only one of the brothers appears to be unafflicted. His younger brother, epileptic and seemingly psychotic, hatches a plan that would set his brother free from being the provider and caretaker for the rest of the family. The subject matter is unsettling, as is director Marco Bellocchio's style. Characters walk in and out of focus at times. Smoothly edited scenes will periodically cut in a seemingly needless shot. Overall, it is an impactful film that is topped off with a truly uncomfortable final scene showing a main character having a seizure while an operatic score is played. Odd.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
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Audience Member
Is it an allegory of the rise of fascism, its ultimate hypocrisy, and its eventual downfall? The films stays with you long after it is over.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A strange, dark and intriguing film, covered in Ennio Morricone's haunting music. Still can't find the right words to explain the story of this dysfunctional family.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
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Audience Member
Tragic and sad. Regardless, It is still fascinating and well made.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
11/28/17
Full Review
Audience Member
Fists in the Pocket is on a list of lost European Cinema classics that have been recently unearthed and redistributed.
I can't believe this film was never a cult favorite. It has all the earmarks, chief of which is the brilliant performance from Lou Castel. He combines James Dean's lurching manic physicality, Timothy Carey's misfit/pariah strangeness and a vague resemblance to Quentin Tarantino (you may viably consider this last quality either an asset or a liability). In this film, he pulls of one of the greatest performances of insanity in movie history, never looking like he was pulling stuff out of an actor's bag o' tricks, fully committed, layered and nuanced, always looking on the edge without being histrionic.
I have a lot of holes in my movie knowledge, especially with non-American movies. Lou Castel has about 150 movie credits on his IMDB resume with most of the greatest European directors of the last 50 years. I never heard of him until I saw this movie last night.
The title of this movie, evocative as Italian movie titles typically are, is thoroughly apt; Castel's hands are figuratively and literally clenched in rage, but kept inside his pockets where they cannot hurt anyone. And so he sits in silent fury until his rage passes, or manifests in other ways.
The movie is about a family of 5, a blind widowed mother and four grown children, only one of whom, Augustino, is able to lead a normal life. He would very much like to marry and move to the city, but he cannot shake his obligations to his dysfunctional family. Alessandro (Castel's character) is epileptic, not to mention having a lot of other problems like delusions of grandeur, some Asperger-y behavior and what we would now recognize as ADD. Sister Giulia is less tangibly, although quite clearly, emotionally disturbed in her own right - she constructs a letter from cutout newspaper letters stating that she is carrying Augustino's baby to scare off his girlfriend. Alessandro and Giulia's relationship has a strong implied incestuous undercurrent. The youngest brother is also epileptic, and mentally handicapped to boot.
These people got problems.
Alessandro, in one of his more lucid moments, concludes that the kindest thing he could do for Augustino is to kill the rest of the family, himself included. He tells Augustino of a plot to crash the car off a cliff with the rest of the family. Augustino dismisses the idea out of hand and tells him not to attempt such a horrible thing. But a short time later, Augustino lets Alessandro take the rest of the family off in the car. Augustino doubts Alessandro is likely to kill them (and in fact, he doesn't), but the viewer can tell that there is a part of him that quietly wishes he would.
I have no interest in horror movies because most of them are just unmotivated scariness. They're not usually about anything really human, it's just going "Boo!" The most disturbing movies come when the horrifying actions are motivated and make sense psychologically. Fists in the Pocket is a perfect example of this. The horror is not the boogeyman with a chainsaw. The horror is that reasonable people could contemplate such things.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
11/06/15
Full Review
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