I pugni in tasca

Four brothers and their blind mother live in a villa in decline. Augusto, the eldest, is the only one who has his own life, some friends and a girlfriend. Giulia has psychologically stopped before her teenage years. Leone, weak and ill, always has to suffer. Ale, finally, is the most impatient, the less willing to pretend or to compromise, he is ill as well.
Ale thinks of “freeing” Augusto from the rest of the family. He is going to kill himself, together with the other two siblings and their mother, in a car accident planned by him. But during the journey he gets distracted and forgets his plan. Once in town, he meets a friend and together they plan to raise chinchillas. He asks Augusto for the money they need, but he refuses, adding that their mother has a cost. Ale kills her making her fall from a gorge. During the funeral he confesses her fault to Giulia. Their mother’s death doesn’t change the shady and complex relationship between them. One day Ale kills Leone in the bath tub. Giulia sees him, falls to the ground and risks of getting paralyzed. When Augusto decides to leave, Ale, in order to stop him, confesses to be the responsible of the two murders. The situation is finally under his control. While he is dancing in his room, to the music of “La Traviata” he is caught by seizures, he asks his sister for help, but she doesn’t move even if she heard him shouting. The last convulsions and then his death.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

The title I pugni in tasca wants to express Alessandro’s deliberately ill attitude in his family and social behaviour; an attitude of rebellion against an existential condition which is never shown as an aware refusal, but which grows with loneliness and tries its strength in a fantastic area ruled by dreams, where frustration and helplessness pile up and increase. Who keeps his fists in his pockets inevitably has to face the consequences of his own indolence: the more the fists were tight in the lack of action, the more will explode the desire of rebellion and the too compressed calling to the evil. (...)
I was interested in looking for the typical reason of a teenager who, despite being constantly defeated and being one of the causes of his own condition, always tries to justify it and he believes he can by charging the reasons of his weakness and misery to his parents, to his birth and to his past. Alessandro’s experience is quite common, everyone can find some common reasons referring to his experience. (...) Of course his experience has extreme resolutions and is practically incomparable with ours; but there is still the will of the teenager to always find reasons to his helplessness which exclude every personal responsibility. Seizures get firstly the meaning of the “excuse”. Alessandro feels free from every duty because he is ill. An illness is the best excuse, because the patient is usually not asked a moral presence, it is enough for him to survive. It is clear that if Alessandro hadn’t been epileptic, he would have created other alibis; in this sense, in I pugni in tasca seizures are the symbol of these teenage hypocrisy. (...)
Augusto is the worst and he could fall under a quite traditional discussion of complaint. The same happens for his girlfriend. After all, there is always such immodesty in Alessandro’s uprising, such an uncontrolled narcissism and at the same time such a fearful and irresponsible resignation that his “executions” lose every value of example. He is lazy all day long, but of course he wants to become a man and thinks he can do it avoiding the longest, hardest, humble and profitable path of daily work, of constant and insensitive progress, choosing the short one instead, the one which can give immediate results. That is because his hallucinations of put his family back together and give it a glory it never had always start from the assumption that he has to exclude those parts of the family that he considers irrecoverable. But because he was caught in his personal revolution, he didn’t understand his mother and his brother, Alessandro doesn’t go further than murder. This mistrust in recovering the whole family shows the morbidity and decay of Alessandro’s behaviour, who unveils through murder a habit that he will always have to respect. (...)
For some progressive directors, it is necessary to create a positive character who can collect all the positive values that they want to save. It is a chorus of people who judge with their voices or with the expression of their faces the other characters’ behaviour. On the contrary, in I pugni in tasca, morality is only given through the style: a cold, objective and unscrupulous style which reveals a constantly ironic behaviour, detached by such an insane and seductive issue, to avoid to the viewer any sort of misunderstanding and let him disapprove, in agreement with the author.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala - English translation Francesca Sala

Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Marco Bellocchio.
Aiuto regia: Vittorio De Sisti.
Director of photography: Alberto Marrama.
Operatore alla macchina: Giuseppe Lanci.
Art director: Rosa Sala.
Costume designer: Gisella Longo.
Editor: Aurelio Mangiarotti (Silvano Agosti).
Music: Ennio Morricone.
Organizzazione: Enzo Doria.
Cast and characters: Lou Castel (Ale), Paola Pitagora (Giulia), Marino Masd (Augusto), Liliana Gerace (madre), Pier Luigi Troglio (Leone), Mauro Martini (il barnbino), Jeannie Mac Neil (Lucia), Gianni Schicchi (Tonino), Alfredo Filippazzi, Stefania Troglio, Gianfranco Cella, Celestina Bellocchio, Irene Agnelli, Lella Bertante.
Production company: Doria Cinematogratica.
Director of Production: Ugo Novello.
Italian distribution: International Film Company.