Acclaimed veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio is in deeply contemplative mood with Marx Can Wait, a warmly personal film that sees him delving into family history, and in particular the circumstances that surround his twin brother Camillo’s suicide, allowing for insight and reflection as he gathers the surviving members of his family around him more than 50 years later.
The film also acts as a genial but rather rambling look at events and people that influenced Bellocchio and his creative career, as well as charting a course through Italian history and cinema, all sat alongside archival footage and family reminiscences. The film premiered in the Cannes Premiere strand at this year’s festival, where Bellocchio also received an honorary Palme d’Or.
Marx Can Wait opens at a Bellocchio family gathering, where toasts are made and wine is drunk. The film swiftly moves into talking head interviews with his surviving siblings, a priest, a psychiatrist and the sister of Camillo’s girlfriend. The subsequent interviews illuminate the family past but more importantly offer insight into how early traumas found their way into the filmmaker’s work.
Dark childhood incidents are echoed in Bellocchio’s 1980 film A Leap in the Dark, which had scenes of children hiding under a bed while an older brother screams and rages. It mirrors how, as a child, Camillo was made to share a room with an older brother named Paolo, who was clearly troubled given his frequent screaming fits (and whom Bellocchio describes as a “lunatic”). The family admits to the problems with Paolo, but Bellocchio also adds that no-one really considered the impact on Camillo having to share the bedroom.
Camillo turns out to be a popular character but one who also carried melancholy with him as he found it hard to match the success of his twin and older brother.
Bellocchio sadly recalls his last meeting with his depressed brother before his death in 1969. Bellocchio recalls how he was full of political fervour, but Camillo simply replied “Marx can wait”…a line that Bellocchio reused in his 1982 film The Eyes, The Mouth featuring an actor who has to deal with the suicide of her twin brother. The family retelling of that suicide is harrowing, while it is heartbreaking to see Marco’s attempts to explain what happened to his adult children Pier Giorgio and Elena.
The archival footage helps scene-set elegantly and the interviews with the resolutely middle-class family can be engaging and illuminating (though often also a little disjointed), but at the heart of the film is an underlying sense of guilt about the loss of his twin. That lingering sadness permeates the film as Marco tries to understand what happened and why, rather than seek some kind of absolution.
Italy, 2021, 95mins
Dir/scr Marco Bellocchio
Production Kavac Film, Rai Cinema, IBC Movie, Tender Stories
International Sales The Match Factory
Producers Simone Gattoni, Beppe Caschetto
Cinematography Michele Cherchi Palmieri, Paolo Ferrari
Editor Francesca Calvelli
Music Ezio Bosso
