FISTS IN THE POCKET

Italy | 1965 | DCP | 108 min. | Italian with English subtitles
Director: Marco Bellocchio
Cast: Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Mase
Alessandro (Castel) is an epileptic young man trapped in a decaying provincial household, whose resentment drives him toward a violent “solution” for his dysfunctional, dependent family. Bellocchio’s ferocious debut (at age 26) uses dark humor to expose the hypocrisies of middle-class Catholic respectability. An explosion in post-neorealist Italian cinema, I pugni i tasca foreshadows the radical energies that would soon reshape Europe’s filmmaking and cultural politics.