Marx Can Wait

The latest film by Marco Bellocchio, Honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes 2021

YEAR

2021

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY

Marco Bellocchio

PHOTOGRAPHY

Michele Cherchi Palmieri and Paolo Ferrari

EDITING

Francesca Calvelli

MUSIC

Ezio Bosso

WORLD PREMIERE AT 74th CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, IN CINEMAS FROM JULY 15th 2021

Through his family, Marco Bellocchio brings his brother's story to life, without filters or modesty, almost like an investigation that reconstructs a historical era and weaves the thread of so much of his cinema.

"On 16 December 2016 Letizia, Pier Giorgio, Maria Luisa, Alberto and I, Marco, the surviving Bellocchio sisters and brothers gathered with wives, children and grandchildren at the Circolo dell'Unione in Piacenza to celebrate various birthdays. I had organised the lunch with the idea of making a film about my family, but I still didn't have a clear idea. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. In reality, the aim was something else... To make a film about Camillo, the angel, the protagonist of this story. "Marx can wait' tells of the death of Camillo, my twin brother, on 27 December 1968. A totally autobiographical story, but which wants to be "universal" (otherwise what interest could it have?) for at least two reasons: a reflection on the pain of the survivors (were we healthy enough brothers to feel pain?), but above all on the desire to hide the truth from our mother, convinced that otherwise she would not have borne the tragedy. Hence the theatre in the tragedy.
The second reason is that Camillo's death falls in a 'revolutionary' year, 1968. The year of the protest, sexual freedom, the French May, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but all these revolutions passed by Camillo's life, they did not interest him. "Marx can wait," he told me the last time we met..."

It took Marco Bellocchio almost fifty years to process [...] the suicide of his twin brother Camillo, but the result is a film - to call it a documentary would be reductive - that deserves to be on a par with his best works.

Paolo Mereghetti, CORRIERE DELLA SERA

"Marx can wait" is an extraordinary document(ary), a synthesis of Marco Bellocchio's cinema and at the same time a profoundly intimate revelation of the director's personality

Paola Casella, MyMovies.it