Film Forum

(1965) Ah, la famiglia. In a country house outside Piacenza, a blind mother holds all the deeds, while elder brother Augusto, the only one with a job, wants to marry his way out, but it’s hard to do after his fiancée receives an incriminating letter, obviously from sister Giulia, who in turn has to fend off under-the-table footsying from epileptic brother Lou Castel and his barely suppressed rage (think of the title)… Add man-child youngest brother Leone, some murder attempts (two successful), an epileptic fit or two, and Castel’s magnetically hateful performance for a scabrous look at an Italian institution – Bellocchio’s debut. (The villa was borrowed from his own mother.) DCP restoration. Approx. 105 min.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Restored by Cineteca Di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritroata Laboratory, with the support of Giorgio Armani.

Reviews

“One of the reasons people still remember Italian cinema as a great and powerful force. It dropped like a bomb on the quiet world of mid-sixties Italian cinema.”
– Deborah Young

“Abandons the conventional bourgeois ethics and stability for something (or anything) new and dangerous.”
– David Thomson

“The film is shot and cut to give the same impression as the desperate jerks of an epileptic’s electroencephalograph record… It is a deep and extraordinary film, and a wholly exceptional first work.”
– David Robinson

“Exhilaratingly cool and assured… One of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies.”
– Pauline Kael

“[A] frenetic Italian masterpiece... One of the key European films of the ’60s.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York