Cinema Talk

I mentioned in my review of Bellocchio’s first film Fists in the Pocket that it lacks the political specificity of this, his follow-up. That seems to be an understatement. He’s pulled on a similar yarn here – once again most of the action takes place in a claustrophobic bourgeois mansion. The incestuous energy is admittedly toned down here but there’s still ample psychosexual tension. The difference of course is that the political subtext of the previous film becomes, well, the text here. Here, there is not one ideology that is privileged and one satirized but instead a multifaceted sendup of the entire ideological axis. In the end, no one ends up looking particularly great.

Working class lovers Carlo and Giovanna awake from a mutual embrace in less-than-ideal circumstances. The setting for this lovers’ tryst is two benches pushed together in a cold room. The house belongs to an upper-class professor, Vittorio, and his sister Elena. Elena is politically conservative and sexually adventurous. Vittorio, meanwhile, is taking an opportunity to boast about his newfound socialist leanings. A third family member, Camillo, struggles to establish a limited and strict Maoist group. Eager to break into the protective grasp of a wealthy family, Carlo and Giovanna both sleep their way upward; Carlo impregnates Elena and Giovanna is impregnated by Vittorio, who continues to stumble his way through a campaign for municipal office.

Much of the sexuality that was suggested in Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket is made literal here. The film opens immediately with our would-be heroes/lovers in an embrace, and the subsequent social climbing seductions that both undertake shortly thereafter are very matter of fact. Carlo beds Elena almost immediately, without even a moment to develop any sexual tension between the two. This works appropriately with the story Bellocchio and his screenwriter Elda Tattoli (who also plays Elena) are attempting to tell. In this world, sexuality functions almost like a social currency, and this is cynically believed by not only the film’s writers but by the characters of Carlo and Giovanna as well.

Carlo and Giovanna do not become our noble and upstanding work class heroes. Instead, their cynicism (mirroring Bellocchio’s own but differing in its interpretation) renders them as calculating and sinister as Vittorio and Elena, the comfortably bourgeoise siblings. Vittorio’s cynicism develops in his nearly spontaneous interest in politics. His interest is nearly almost entirely driven by power, which lands as the perfect punchline when the setup for the joke is he’s running for office as a socialist. Carlo acts as his accountant and unofficial guide to the Italy that exists outside of the family’s mansion. He’s, of course, not as much interested in Vittorio’s success in government as he in exposing to him to as many difficult situations as possible.

In one key sequence, Carlo arranges Vittorio to speak as a town square. Unimpressed with the turnout, Vittorio is immediately incensed, but Carlo talks him into proceeding, “Just admit you’re shitting your pants” he tells the professor. The fecal rhetoric works on him but the whole things turns on it’s head when a disgruntled Vittorio’s papers are blown away, and he feels so utterly helpless that he has no choice but to take out his frustrations on a small boy. It’s the sort of spectacular public speaking disaster that isn’t entirely foreign to local politics in 2023, which makes the humor ring even truer. As they watch a hostile crowd descend into madness, Carlo remarks to Elena rather nonchalantly, “your brother is rather nervous.”

While the consensus on China is Near is that no one character comes out unblemished or avoids ridicule, it’s perhaps the film’s most passively non-political character who comes out most conscious of the untamable and unsalvageable nature of the political machine. It’s Elena, Vittorio’s sister, played by the film’s screenwriter Elda Tattoli. There is little to nothing written about Tattoli’s career in general and only Andrew Sarris’ review even makes passing reference to the fact that she wrote the film. Her presence is staggering to me, as she seems the numbest to all the chaos enveloping everything else. Tattoli collaborated two more times with Bellocchio. First, she codirected with Bellocchio a segment for 1969’s Love and Anger, which also featured contributions from Bertolucci and Godard. Later, in 1972, she made her full-length directorial debut with Pianeta Venere, a film which I am unable to find as of this writing. Her pen and her performance suggest a career of worthwhile contributions to cinema but outside of the projects I’ve already mentioned, it seems her career was resigned to bit roles in Italian sword-and-sandals pictures. She died in 2005.