At the age of twenty-six Bellocchio discharged a shocking opening salvo upon unprepared Italian audiences—who either vehemently rejected or embraced its blasphemous mutiny only a few years before the 1968 student uprisings. Detailing the pathology within a languishing bourgeois family in the detached, irreverent manner of the nouvelle vague, Fists in the Pocket hypnotizes with a quiet horror that alternately simmers and releases within incestuously close quarters. The stagnation and confusion of the immature siblings and their blind, devout mother—who only leaves the house to visit her husband’s grave—manifests most animatedly in the reckless ambivalence of their loosest cannon, Alessandro. Played with a prescient punk instability by Lou Castel, the epileptic Alessandro attempts to move the family out of their tomb via radical means. Acutely framed by an uncompromising camera and underscored by Ennio Morricone’s spectral tracks, a tormented tenderness lies just beneath Alessandro’s fulfillment of what may be their collective, desperate wishes.