Bellocchio maps the moral evolution of his family in the wake of a long-ago tragedy.
Do you ever stop to wonder where all this content, all this media, is coming from? There’s so much — theatrical movies, streaming, fake news, and the show trials — that it’s hard to keep up or find sense in the glut. Most of it seems to be made by an ever-grinding Moloch machine rather than by humans, and almost never by artists. That’s why the confessional documentary Marx Can Wait is so shockingly moving. It’s by Italy’s Marco Bellocchio, who has been making remarkable, politically inflected movies since the mid 1960s. With this latest, he continues his tireless winning streak.
Whenever a Bellocchio film opens here, sneaking in past gatekeepers who favor race, gender, and Asian virtue-signaling quotas (curiously, the Parasite, Squid Game, Drive My Car nihilists), the apparent indifference to him as one of the few remaining European masters seems part of a stealth revolution that is turning its back on Western history, thought, and influence. Marxist, Maoist revenge.
Ironically, Bellocchio comes from the same Italian-leftist tradition that has also spawned Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini, Rosi, Bertolucci, Pontecorvo, and so many others who viewed human behavior from a Marxist perspective. But these were personal artists foremost. In the domestic chronicle of Marx Can Wait, Bellocchio reexamines the inspirations behind his own career, politics, and faith. The personal revelation that he had a twin brother, Camillo, born three hours after him, suffering life-long defects, doesn’t explain Bellocchio’s work so much as enhance one’s appreciation for his creative balancing acts — that compassionate, satirical view of the interplay between family, politics, religion, and psychology that rivaled Luis Buñuel, and that has been Bellocchio’s life’s work. He and Godard are the last extant truly great filmmakers.
Brief clips from Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, Leap into the Void, The Eyes, the Mouth, and My Mother’s Smile are just accents to the main narrative in which Bellocchio reunites the remaining members of his affluent, educated family and they discuss how Camillo’s short life (he committed suicide at age 29 in 1968) affected the clan’s feelings about art, faith, and living. “Survival is a major theme,” one member reflects, and so each person’s intellectual and emotional perseverance — through memories and present-day feelings — becomes this documentary’s spectacle, as in Bellocchio’s dramatic epic Dormant Beauty.
Camillo haunts the Bellocchio family across the generations, exposing their beliefs. These are more than footnotes to an artist’s filmography. Describing “the hell that was our home” could apply to Fists in the Pocket, In the Name of the Father, and China Is Near, but it begins a trenchant expression of modern consciousness. Elder brother Piergiorgio makes a priceless comment about Visconti and Pasolini’s influence on Marco, but it was Camillo who rejected Marco’s fashionable commitment to “revolutionary optimism” (and unveiled their fraternal competition). It stung when Camillo simply declared, “Marx can wait.” So much for erudition, family issues matter more.
Marx Can Wait sustains the fascination of a Eugene O’Neill monologue. The fact of Camillo’s “veil of melancholy that never left him” is just one of the breathtaking family remembrances. (An aunt envisions Camillo “in boreal light.”) Even Bellocchio’s adult children, who first regard his confession skeptically, recognize his profound emotions and then are humbled. Their inheritance of talent, advantages, guilt, and forgiveness through POV shots is extraordinary filmmaking; it shames that sanctimonious PBS TV show on ancestry, Finding Your Roots, as sheer narcissism.
Bellocchio opens his own art to criticism. He’s amused when the anti-clerical comedy of My Mother’s Smile and In the Name of the Father prompts the family priest to say Bellocchio has a “gift for faith using metaphors,” explaining, “You’re a penitent to me.” Too bad Ingmar Bergman never risked such open-hearted analysis. “You’ve already made and repeated the confession so many times,” Bellocchio is told. So much for erudition when a 73-year-old artist asks himself the big question.
Religion stays with Bellocchio, as does imagination and ingenuity, which makes Marx Can Wait an extraordinary document of the moral evolution of an artist and his family. I haven’t felt this close to a filmmaker since the shock of recognition sparked by the film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night. It exposes our own cultural evolution during this deluge of meaningless content.
