Camillo died in December 1968, surrendering to life while the young were making the revolution, a revolution that for him "could wait."

Camillo had other priorities that left no room for anything else, and no one understood this intimate tragedy.

Camillo's anonymous innocence was overshadowed by a successful twin, Marco, an intellectual and a union leader; the two sisters watched while everyone lived focused on themselves, while the father died of cancer, the mother was drunk with faith, and the eldest son filled the house with screams of madness.

The beginning with a horseshoe-shaped table brings the whole family together, possibly the last chance to be all together.

Camillo, the angelic twin of Marco, was born three hours after his brother, asphyxiated and thus baptized three times to allow him to access limbo... but he continued to live, in his own way, perhaps forever marked by this birth.

The twins were raised on formula milk and with the help of a wet nurse: the mother never forgave herself for not producing milk.

While Mussolini was coming to power, the director shows a photo of the two twins with a frightened look and proceeds with interviews with family members and archival footage.

On July 13, 1944, Piacenza was overwhelmed by bombings, and the family had to evacuate, the same family that voted for the monarchy, not the republic, in the referendum.

Marco and Camillo went to school together and were terrified by the fear of hell and communism taught by priests at the S. Vincenzo middle school.

Meanwhile, Camillo was put to sleep in the room of his older brother Paolo, who was 10 years older and had psychiatric disorders; he did not express any refusal about this but struggled to study and was sent to a technical institute.

A veil of melancholy always accompanied him, although he surrounded himself with friends and led an apparently frivolous and uncommitted life.

A request made to his director brother, who does not remember responding to it, left him confused about his professional fulfillment, which did not seem to satisfy him even once achieved.

From the accounts, he seemed to have no vocation, appearing confused and indecisive.

Camillo did not attract attention neither for excess nor for deficiency, and the lack of recognition, his not being seen, surely left an indelible mark on the formation of his personality and self-esteem.

While his brother Marco received recognition and awards and invited him to embrace revolutionary optimism, Camillo responded that Marx could wait, optimism did not concern him.

On December 27, 1968, he committed suicide, leaving two letters.

The mother undressed, screamed, and asked why she didn't die; she later declared she understood those who use drugs and alcohol.... She could not go to the cemetery, feeling rejected.

She believed she would end up in the flames of hell, experiencing the biblical horror of the Old Testament, that blindness of faith represented in Fists in the Pocket.

In the family, despite the letters, there were those who did not believe in suicide but in an accident; there were those who invented dreams of seeing him happy.

No one noticed Camillo's tragedy: here lies Bellocchio's investigation, recognizing due responsibilities without false sentimentalism; not loving him enough led to the need to remember the tragedy and be present for it.

As in this case, Bellocchio has always rewound, reproduced, and declined the film of his life with a feline gaze, attacking his experiences with incisive and surgical interpretations, without hypocrisy and sentimentality.

His is an anarchic cinema, born from the ashes of neorealism; starting with Fists in the Pocket (1965) and continuing as a mathematical, logical self-analysis that tears the veil of Maya of representation to throw the acid of an unconscious, uncaused, irrational, and chaotic will that reveals the Aletheia autographed by the director as a profanation of the bourgeois family that lives by the rule of falsification.

His filmography is like a psychoanalytic Via Crucis, not self-absolving, where each film is an autobiographical or biographical station from which his experience emerges, through the socio-historical cross-section and the lucidly represented anti-bourgeois political and familial dysfunctional vision: the director's commendable ability to organize the representation of the logic of the illogicality of the family, society, politics, culture system.

Bellocchio's cinematic dialectic, seemingly Hegelian, completes its journey and arrives at the inevitable rejection of a conciliatory synthesis between thesis and antithesis to defend the primary function of dialectics as a tool for understanding the real: a negative dialectic that questions the identity of reason and reality to reveal the unresolved disharmonies and contradictions that characterize the world we live in.

His is a cinema of denunciation: it makes us reflect without concessions and brings to the surface everything we would like to forget; it gives voice to what ideology hides, posing as a utopian anticipation of a world made for humans, that world that was put on hold by Camillo's response when he answered his brother's revolutionary invitation with: "Marx can wait."

22-Jun-2023 by Beatrice