Bellocchio, Marco

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    ‘Exterior Night’ Review: Life in Perilous Times

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    The Italian master Marco Bellocchio turns to TV, revisiting the mysteries of the Aldo Moro affair.When the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio made “Good Morning, Night” in 2003, about the 1978 kidnapping and killing of the politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, he provided a fanciful, heartbreaking coda: an image of Moro walking away from captivity, looking not much worse for wear after 55 days in a small cell.Bellocchio revisits the Moro affair in his first television series, “Exterior Night,” and once again he frees Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) for just a bit. This time the scholarly, prickly statesman gets to stare down his colleagues in Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and tell them exactly how and why they have allowed him to die.(Released in 2022, the series is now available in the United States on MHz Choice, where the third and fourth of six episodes will stream beginning Tuesday.)Moro’s abduction and death was a watershed moment in the “years of lead,” when politically motivated bombings, shootings, kidnappings and assassinations convulsed Italy and other European countries. But it is a story that can speak to anyone who has a sense of living in perilous times. As a character in “Exterior Night” says, a society can tolerate a certain amount of crazy behavior, but “when the crazy party has the majority, we’ll see what happens.”What makes Moro’s fate such prime material for dramatization, though, are its elements of mystery and imponderability and its hints of conspiracy, as murky today as they were four decades ago. Why did Moro’s own government — of which he would have become president later that year — refuse to negotiate for his release? Why did the Red Brigades finally kill him, knowing it probably would be disastrous for their cause?“Good Morning, Night,” told from the point of view of a female captor who begins to sympathize with Moro, was a splendid film, both passionate and razor sharp. Working across five and a half hours in “Exterior Night,” Bellocchio spreads out, adding historical detail and giving space to players he had little or no room for in the film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ Review: Church vs. State

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      This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case — covered by the Italian author Daniele Scalise, whose book the film is based upon, and by David Kertzer, an American scholar and expert on the papacy and antisemitism — became an international cause for Jewish organizations in Europe as well as proponents of the unification of Italy, including the papal states, into a kingdom. Even Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, expressed concern.The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in Edgardo’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.Throughout his life, Edgardo remained faithful to the church. In the film, one gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo MortaraNot rated. In Italian and Hebrew. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Marx Can Wait’ Review: A Director Digs Into His Brother’s Death

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      In a moving new documentary, the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio gathers his fascinating, aging family members to make sense of their brother’s suicide.Sometime in the late 1960s, Camillo Bellocchio confided in his twin brother, Marco, that he was unhappy with the way his life was going. Marco, already a well-known filmmaker and a committed leftist, counseled Camillo, who was managing a gym, to throw himself into radical politics and seek solace in the “historical optimism” of the revolutionary proletariat. Camillo doubted that his anguish could be healed through political engagement. “Marx can wait,” he told his brother. Not long after, Camillo died by suicide. He was 29.A fictionalized version of that conversation occurs in Marco Bellocchio’s 1982 film “The Eyes, the Mouth.” The relevant clip, along with other fragments from the director’s oeuvre, is inserted into his new documentary, “Marx Can Wait,” a wrenching and tender film that will be essential viewing for Bellocchio fans. But even for those who aren’t familiar with the personal and national history he has explored in more than 20 films, “Marx Can Wait” can stand on its own. It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.Marco and Camillo were the youngest of eight children born into a bourgeois family in the small Northern Italian city of Piacenza. In 2016, Marco, one of five surviving siblings, gathered with his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children for a reunion in their hometown. Filmed over several years, “Marx Can Wait” starts with toasts and table-talk, and then gravitates toward the black hole of Camillo’s death, in the process illuminating the legacy of a difficult and fascinating family.That family was Bellocchio’s first great subject. His debut film, “Fists in the Pocket” (1965), shot in Piacenza, turns domestic dysfunction, generational frustration and sibling resentment into the stuff of gothic, scabrous comedy. Awarded a prize at the Locarno Film Festival, “Fists” and the ferocious political satire “China is Near” (1967) established Bellocchio, still in his 20s, as an enfant terrible in Italian cinema.The IFC Center in Manhattan is showing those movies alongside “Marx Can Wait,” bringing the young man of the ’60s into poignant dialogue with his older self. Bellocchio’s career, between then and now, can be seen partly as a chronicle of disillusionment, as revolutionary ardor gives way to irony, compromise and defeat. His many films about Italian public figures and institutions — Mussolini; the violent, far-left Red Brigades; the Roman Catholic Church; and the Mafia — are also family stories, attentive to intimate nuances of power and emotion.The reverse is also true. “Marx Can Wait” is entirely absorbed in the faces, voices and personalities of Bellocchio’s brothers and sisters, present and absent, but it also feels, by implication or osmosis, to be telling the story of Italy in the past half century. Camillo’s fate is linked to the expectation that a young man of his background would pursue stability and worldly success — family and career — or else rebel in a dramatic and consequential way. He seems never to have found a path, and to have despaired of finding one.But suicide isn’t a mystery that can be solved, perhaps least of all by those closest to its victim. Marco and his brothers and sisters dwell on details and speculate about causes, including the influence of a mentally ill older brother, Paolo, who shared a room with Camillo when they were children, and the volatile presence of their devout, emotionally demanding mother. Repressed memories bubble up, secrets are revealed, but nothing is resolved. Freud can wait, too.Old photographs and film clips do their usual documentary work, but the power of “Marx Can Wait” comes from the faces and the voices of people, now in their 80s, trying at once to evoke and to make sense of their younger selves. Marco’s brother Piergiorgio and his sister Letizia, who is deaf, are especially vital, spiky characters.That Faulknerian chestnut about the not-even-pastness of the past has rarely been illustrated with such vivid intimacy. The loss of Camillo is ongoing, wrapped around the family’s life like a vine, impossible to untangle or prune away. What makes this film tender as well as tragic is how that loss also makes the family blossom before our eyes.Marx Can WaitNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More