Marx Can Wait (Marco Bellocchio, 2021) (Patreon)

Marx Can Wait is perhaps a bit of a detour in Bellocchio's career, since he hasn't made very many documentaries, and his late style is characterized by an expansive, operatic mode that's in stark contrast to this rather straightforward family chronicle. But then, as Bellocchio demonstrates throughout the film, the suicide of his twin brother Camillo has been haunting his films throughout his career. As we see in the interviews, the Bellocchio siblings are already quite old. (Marco is the "baby," at 83.) Given that certain aspects of this tragedy have remained ambiguous, Bellocchio clearly decided that if he ever planned to talk with his family about what happened to Camillo, the time is now.

As we learn, the Bellocchios were fairly well-off, and as far as education and financial support goes, the siblings had more opportunities than most. Their father was a successful lawyer, the second-oldest brother Piergiorgio was an academic man of letters, and the middle brother Alberto was a painter. By contrast, Camillo failed out of numerous schools, drifting about with no plan for the future. To complicate matters, there were two siblings who received a great deal of attention due to their impairments. The oldest brother was schizophrenic, and one of the sisters was deaf. So Camillo's failure to make something of himself was implicitly compared with his high-achieving siblings on the one hand, and those with more obvious struggles on the other.

So in the contemporary parlance, Camillo was a "failson," someone whose inability to thrive was compounded with a sense of guilt and shame. In time, he graduated from a sports academy, working as a gym coach and even opening his own gym. But just as the family thought he was settled, everything fell apart. Some members of the family, including Camillo's mother, refused to believe that it was suicide, convincing themselves that it was some bizarre death by misadventure. With her old fashioned Catholic beliefs, Mama Bellocchio would have been certain that Camillo was burning in hellfire, had she known the truth.

A lot of Marx Can Wait consists of Camillo's family looking back at all the signs they missed, coming to grips with their regrets. Marco, in particular, has alluded to Camillo's suicide in numerous films, and he seems to believe that his political radicalism blinded him to the more immediate crisis of Camillo's anguish. The title comes from Camillo's response when Marco insisted that his brother should devote himself to serving the revolution, as if his depressive isolation were a mere bourgeois affectation. As a work of creative autobiography, Marx Can Wait is both poignant and damning, Bellocchio regarding his late twin brother's path as one he might just as easily have taken had things been different. And while Bellocchio remains a firm atheist, Marx Can Wait is a hard reckoning that strongly suggests a uniquely Christian mode of compassion: there but for the grace of God go I.