The Traitor

Marco Bellocchio's Il Traditore has a very late point of attack, but then it also goes on far longer than it ought to. It's an odd way to tell this story of the first trials to bring down Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Italy. But it's so stylishly and intriguingly made and Pierfrancesco Favino is so good that Il Traditore manages still to be emotionally affecting and interesting throughout, even if the tone frequently felt off to me.

Fists in the Pocket

I know that I frequently complain on this blog about movies about disaffected young people who don't have any direction and mope about their houses. I recently complained about Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles for doing this, and my distaste for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is well documented.

But recently I saw Lindsay Anderson's If...., a very cool story about kids who are unhappy with their status quo and rebel, and today I watched a film by Marco Bellocchio called Fists in the Pocket from 1965. It's about a young man who lives in a villa in the mountains with his younger sister, blind mother, and retarded younger brother. He is sick of this family life and so he rebels against it in an intriguing, vaguely horrifying way: by pushing his mother off a cliff. The boy is such an interesting character, too. I mean, he's obviously pathologically disturbed and all of that, but he's quiet and sad and Bellocchio pays very close attention. We watch his every move and never have a clear idea of what he's going to do. He could really kill anyone at any given moment in the film. It's a very interesting character study.

The extras on the DVD include some cool interviews with the cast and director, and a tribute to the film by Bernardo Bertolucci, which is a fascinating watch.

Buongiorno, Notte

This morning's cinematic adventure was an Italian film by Marco Bellocchio called Good Morning, Night. It's a very good movie about a terrorist kidnapping/would-be-assassination in 1978 Italy. I'm not sure if the real event is well known: I know next-to-nothing about contemporary Italian politics, and much less about the Italian political situation in the 1970's. Good Morning, Night approaches the story of this kidnapping through the point of view of one of the kidnappers—a female, played by Maya Sansa. She's wonderful in the film and her story expresses a fascinating conflict in the mind of the revolutionary. Good Morning, Night, in fact, is the film about terrorism that Munich wishes it were. It tackles the goals and ideals of the revolutionaries/radicals and weighs them against the cost of human life paid in order to exact political change. It's a fascinating drama with a lot of really excellent performances.