Marx can wait
Marco Bellocchio
Italy | 2021 | 95 min
Swiss Premiere
Language : Italian
Subtitles : French, English
Camillo Bellocchio took his own life in 1968, shortly after alerting his twin brother Marco to his distress, inviting him to take a step back from his political struggle: “Marx can wait”. The filmmaker confronts his family with this deep-seated wound during a gathering that holds the key to reading a body of work that has never ceased to converse with reality.
Marx può aspettare (Marx can wait) is the phrase uttered by Camillo Bellocchio that his filmmaker-twin Marco, intoxicated by the radicalness of his Maoist struggle, was unable to understand as a forewarning of his distress. The tragic peak of 1968 - a year that was gratifying because marked by revolutionary episodes - Camillo’s suicide is the deep-seated wound of a director who had already placed fraternal conflict at the heart of his first films (twinship even being the implicit subject of I Pugni in tasca and La Cina è vicina). The filmmaker seizes the opportunity of an octogenarian family reunion to confront the Bellocchio dynasty with their guilt, with the help of a device that mixes contemporary shots and historic archives. The film is filled with quotations from his previous films, thereby enriching our perception of a body of work that has never ceased to converse with reality, while supporting the characteristic themes of his filmmaking: mistrust vis-à-vis the the family and its vampirism and the dismantling of mechanisms of enslavement, whatever they may be. An intimacy which Bellocchio asserts more forcefully than ever before.
Pierre Guidez
