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Blood of My Blood
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Blood of My Blood has a dual
structure that brings together, ingeniously, the dramatic and satirical veins
of Marco Bellocchio’s great career.
Its first tale, set in the 17th century,
returns to the more-or-less feminist ground of his 1980s films, detailing the
brutal, church-sanctioned inquisition of a nun, Benedetta (Lidiya Liberman),
accused of being in league with Satan and pushing a priest to suicide through
her seductive wiles. In a dark inversion of My
Mother’s Smile (2001) with its process of testing for saintliness, here it
is a woman’s inner demon that must be gruesomely verified.
Every detail of the status quo here is caught in a
serial mirroring: rows of identical-looking nuns and monks, two giggly sisters,
and look-alike brothers (played by Bellocchio’s son, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio)
who both, ultimately, react to Benedetta’s libido in exactly the same,
disavowing, repressive way.
Jump to the present-day: the same convent, long
deserted by religion, is now the hideout for an ancient vampire, Count Basta
(Roberto Herlitzka, another Bellocchio regular). The film uses this device as
comical allegory: Basta, as it transpires, presides over a secret society that controls
virtually every arm of the State, from police and the law courts to hospitals
and the media. As always in Bellocchio’s work of the 21st century,
the shadow of corrupt, right-wing politics under Silvio Berlusconi is never far
away as a sore point of reference.
Even the most conventional screenwriting manuals from
Hollywood today preach that, if you are going to use a tricky mosaic of several
different, largely disconnected plots, you must still structure them with the
expected turning points, climax and resolution of a single story. And
Bellocchio is, in fact, a master at achieving just this effect.
At the very moment that the vampire Basta in Blood of My Blood begins to die at dawn
from his “rigidity”, his inability to adapt and change with history, the film
jumps to a point in time when Benedetta, in the first tale, walled up for
decades, is finally about to be absolved and set free by the very man who
condemned her to this fate.
In the ensuing brilliant sequence that was in fact filmed
with a filmmaking class in Bobbio back in 2009, Benedetta emerges: young, naked
and beautiful, as the priest falls down dead. In Bellocchio’s cinema, the
revenge of the female libido is sweet indeed.
MORE Bellocchio: Good Morning, Night, Fists in the Pocket, The Traitor, Marx Can Wait © Adrian Martin January 2018 |
