Synopsis
Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca, 1965) is Marco Bellocchio's debut feature, available to watch online on iFILM. He made it at twenty-six, with money scraped together independently and almost no industry backing — and it hit Italian cinema like a slap. The film takes place largely inside one house: a blind mother, epileptic siblings, and the one son, Augusto, who has a chance at a normal life if only the rest of the family would stop drowning him.
His younger brother Alessandro, played by Lou Castel, arrives at a solution. Not in a breakdown, not in a rage — just a quiet, almost reasonable decision that the family members who can't function should stop existing so Augusto can inherit and escape. Paola Pitagora plays the sister watching all of this from an angle that's never entirely innocent.
Bellocchio offers no psychological explanation and no moral resolution, which is what makes the film so hard to shake sixty years later. It belongs to the same ruthless strain of Italian art cinema as the early Bertolucci — though it goes somewhere darker. Stream Fists in the Pocket (1965) online on iFILM.
Starring
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