The multifaceted work of Marco Bellocchio arrives with Marx Can Wait at a crossroads, where it is necessary to decide: to remain forever on the tangled past path of historical, political, and family remorse or to take, after a final retrospective adjustment, a path of intellectual, human freedom and morality? Bellocchio, after having dealt with the recurring ghost of his brother’s suicide with the help of fiction in the film The Eyes, the Mouth, looks at himself in the mirror and, following the rules of the documentary, looks friends, relatives, and different interlocutors in the face. His face-to-face with the painful memory of death within the family becomes an opportunity to wash his bloody clothes in public, making it an unfortunate but exemplary case of political-social history. As in a mystery of the soul, the search for the murderer leads to a culprit who has remained unpunished over time: his faces are the cult of politics, the altar of ideology or the tragic “religion of History” that he leaves behind in the bodies of the most fragile subjects. Yet, with the final image of Bellocchio himself wandering across the Ponte Gobbo of his native village, Bobbio, in the role of Verdi’s Rigoletto, once again the mockery is triggered. Paradoxically, in this long journey into the dark zone of mourning, it is the young brother who triumphs with a precise gesture, a symptom of extreme rejection, indifferent to the cultural and political climate of his time. In fact, he took his own life in 1968: during the protest. The reflection and comparison that Bellocchio activates in front of and behind the camera therefore leads to the dead end of madness seen as a frustrated revolution. The filmic reasoning on delirium, never delirious, transforms the author of Marx Can Wait into an inevitable protagonist, who has found the key to the problem: historical disillusionment makes the suicide of an isolated individual the dark mirror of a suffered generational destiny. — Anton Giulio Mancino

In Italian with English subtitles