Cannes Film Festival 2021: Marco Bellocchio honored

“I made a few mistakes but I have no regrets. » This is how Marco Bellochio closed Thursday, July 15 the meeting organized by the Cannes Film Festival with the Italian director a few days before the Palme d’or d’honneur which will be awarded to him on Saturday, July 17. A trophy that has always eluded him despite his seven selections since The leap into the void in 1980, until Traitor in 2019, unfairly ignored by the charts.

→ READ THE REVIEW. “The Traitor”, itinerary of a repentant from the mafia

It must be said that this eternal protester who has never ceased to question institutions (family, social, religious) and the established order, is never where he is expected and refuses labels, in particular that of filmmaker engaged that was attributed to him after his first film Fists in the pocketsconsidered as a precursor of the social movements of May 68. “There was nothing political about it, is he defending himself today. In 1967 I realized China is near just as Godard was leaving The Chinese. We both won prizes in Venice, but my film was a simple satire of the Italian PC and PS of the time, whereas Godard’s film was a Maoist film. It’s very different. »

An identity crisis

Yet his commitment to the far left plunges him into a deep identity crisis which leads him, he says, to question his status as “bourgeois filmmaker”. Until his awareness at the beginning of the 1970s of the failure of the Maoist adventure and his refusal of the political violence embodied by the red brigades. “I dropped politics and came back to myself, even if utopia did not disappear all of a sudden” and shines through in his subsequent films.

That “inner search” led him, like many left-wing intellectuals of the time, towards psychoanalysis and in particular towards the theories of Italian psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli, champion of collective analysis, who co-signed his scenarios. The films resulting from this collaboration (The leap into the void, The devil in the body Where butterfly’s dream) are poorly received. “I managed to deepen something in me without denying my cinemahe justifies himself, even if I was considered in Italy as an artist who lost himself and denied his identity. »

Realism mixed with dreams

The filmmaker defends in his cinema a realism “which leaves the possibility of the dream” and can sometimes take liberties with the facts. With age and maturity, he admits having turned to a more classic cinema whose The traitor is for him the perfect example. “The characters are less important to me, I can observe them from the outside. » However, this film, which won great public and critical success, was a disappointing experience for him. “I didn’t know anything about the mafia, I had to investigate, I placed myself in a foreign world when I was young and preferred to stay within the limits I knew. »

→ MAINTENANCE. Marco Bellocchio: “Bringing an Italian perspective to the mafia film”

The filmmaker came to Cannes with his latest feature film, Marx can wait, presented on Friday July 16 in the Cannes Première section, a documentary dedicated to his twin brother, whose suicide at the age of 29 was a source of guilt and inspiration and has never ceased to haunt his filmography. At the age of 82, he has also started filming in Rome for RAI, in co-production with Arte of a series ” Esterno Notte on the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, a distant echo of his Buongiorno, note released in 2003.