Mona Lisa's Guile

Marco Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile takes a sophisticated approach to usually unexamined social customs. It is so good-critical without being doctrinaire, stylish without being excessive-that even after last year's abundant cinematic marvels it is extraordinarily exhilarating. No Bellocchio film has been imported here for many years, so My Mother's Smile amounts to a stateside comeback. His visceral cinematic wit is in full force.

Bellocchio's protagonist is Ernesto (Sergio Castellitto), a contemporary Roman artist determined to do things his own way. Responding to a book publisher's critique of his illustrations for a new edition of The Pied Piper of Hamlin, Ernesto argues for "an artist's freedom in the face of a child's imagination." Bellocchio shows how deeply that belief runs when Ernesto challenges his family, his associates-even the Vatican-once he discovers they're all conspiring to have his dead mother canonized as a saint.

This premise is subtly outrageous, a farce laid out with Shavian proportion, yet Bellocchio is more a kinetic than dialectical artist. My Mother's Smile features arguments between Ernesto and his estranged wife (Jacqueline Lustig), several priests, his aunt and two of his three brothers, but these highly animated discussions take place in lustrous modern-day settings, each staged with vertiginous movement. This establishes Bellocchio's excitable perspective and makes his bemusement both palpable and infectious. Note that the film's central debate occurs when Ernesto tucks his seven-year-old son in bed and then lowers the boom that he doesn't believe in God. The wide-eyed child remains unfazed. He's his father's son and prefers to think the matter through himself; Bellocchio allows that it provides the boy's own bedtime story delight.

Here Bellocchio pits choice against custom, faith against erudition and, of course, cynicism against wonderment. However, it is Ernesto's struggling with tradition (mistaking rebellion for freedom) that provides the film's ultimate joke. Atheist Ernesto represents the educated skeptical man, but his social position doesn't surround him with like-minded "thinkers" who might buttress his cynical prejudices. Bellocchio takes the tough route-amping the sense of disorientation to comic effect by broadening the range of Ernesto's antagonists. There are no superstitious sentimentalists or rigid evangelicals. Ernesto's distress is primarily secular and political. Bellocchio is beyond fighting the church; his target is the various methods of indoctrination that are endemic to Italian culture. It's a startling and refreshing point of view compared to America's Christian-baiting secularist left. Bellocchio's view is rich rather than partisan.

Ernesto's adversaries profess that agreeing to the canonization is a harmless acquiescence. Individually, they're all hedging their bets by going along with the Church as "an insurance policy." A hilarious dialogue with his rich, craven aunt (Piera Degli Esposti) likens the Church to any advantageous social establishment-"Even the Gramsci Institute," she says. In another absurdist conflict, Conte Bulla (Toni Bertorelli), an aged aristocrat who envies the Church's political clout, seeks a way to subvert and manipulate it. Bulla is wizened yet capable of enormous effrontery. Followed by an entourage of yes-men, he takes offense at Ernesto's secret derisive smile and challenges him to a duel. These characters reflect the Roman Catholic domination of Italian society even in arts, business and politics.

That's the hegemony that Ernesto tries to resist. But his process of resistance is thwarted by his own artistic intuition. He, too, is involved in the effort to make sense of the world just like everyone's need to believe and trust-from his school-age son responding ambivalently to catechism, to a young female painter Ernesto mistakes for a religious teacher (Chiara Conti). He is drawn to her with an erotic intensity that verges on spiritual agape. Even his three brothers demonstrate different ways of coming to terms with faith and tradition. One is a doctor, the other a reformed revolutionary and the third a mental patient incarcerated for having killed their mother when she protested against his frantic blasphemies.

These scenes recall Bellocchio's long interest in the psychological dynamics of domestic relations since Fists in the Pocket, China is Near, Leap into the Void and Nel Nome del Padre. Bellocchio critiques social institutions-from the family to the military-by surveying the forms of madness displayed by the people who are frustrated by social stricture. One of his most provocative jests comes when a priest invites Ernesto to discuss the canonization while presiding over a community meal. Surrounded by the unfortunate and loveless, Ernesto proclaims that his mother was no saint but was, in fact, a cold, stupid woman. Such Freudian slander revives Bellocchio's fascination with perverse or anomic family behavior. (My Mother's Smile opens with a puzzling and troubling scene in which Ernesto's son fulminates against an imaginary intruder.) Even when this Marxist-trained director worked with a filmmaking collective during the 70s and shot Fit to Be Untied, a documentary about a mental institution, he investigated madness as a socially created malady.

Ernesto gets funnier-and madder-as he increasingly finds himself in the outsider position. He's too busy observing the fanaticism all around him to succumb, but his hiatus from art-making is itself a form of self-deprivation. By linking this to a vain Oedipal crisis, Bellocchio makes Ernesto's relationship to his society a more affecting personal dilemma. It's as if post-modern Ernesto were thrown back into the Middle Ages. Castellitto's sad-eyed disbelief creates the effect of a clown in a hermeneutical circus.

Sure enough, Bellocchio directs like a ringmaster, using a surprise-a-minute style. His script suggests comic melodrama or a deadpan farce keyed to Castellitto's captious grin, the confounding reflex he cannot bear to admit that he got from his mother (a typical intellectual's snobbery). Bellocchio's fresh compositions aren't just pictorial or comic; they show critical tact. Perspectives change with every edit, adding new meaning and complexity to a scene. Filmmaking this masterful is what makes one impatient with movies like Tarnation. Neophyte Jonathan Caouette also explored psychological anguish, but he has flimsy technique and is a crippled thinker. Bellocchio juxtaposes and reflects ideas about motherhood, sexuality, religion, politics, greed, madness, asceticism and desire with a facility and intrigue that keeps an attentive viewer dazzled, invigorated and enlightened. It's the best technique.

By coincidence, Criterion has just put out a DVD of Bernardo Bertolucci's first film, La Commare Secca. Bertolucci is Bellocchio's peer (both debuted in the 60s) but also his only rival in the use of sensuous, elating screen space. Although La Commare Secca was based on a story by Pasolini, it is equally the work of a kinetic prodigy. Amidst the low-life neorealism, Bertolucci creates almost as many amazing shots as Citizen Kane. And My Mother's Smile is similarly esthetically astounding but sociologically blunt due to the political blatancy that Bellocchio held on to while Bertolucci went on to greater erotic preoccupations. (It turns out that Bellocchio was Pasolini's truest student, albeit with a superior sense of humor and esthetic command.)

As atheist artist Ernesto traverses a maze of social customs, his paintings are contrasted to the Old Masters' religious icons. He's told: "In unused space, you unleash your talent." It's a good description of how Bellocchio's method revises genre painting or revitalizes film composition, always startling the eye and mind. Every scene provokes-the presence of African immigrants in Italy (a small pageant in a rectory shows the training of African students by church officials); the duel at dawn with Conte Bulla; Ernesto witnessing the creation of a saintly spectacle in his aunt's cottage industry. This unexpected advance in the history of irreverent filmmaking treats Ernesto's bewilderment as a pixilated intellectual spectacle. Bellocchio keeps figures moving, and our attention pitched in the midst of activity. Without a sense of formal framing, the screen always seems open to surprise-or miracle.

When Ernesto faces a huge wall-projection portrait of his mother smiling as slyly as Mona Lisa, it epitomizes his crisis-plus, it's the first awesome movie image of 2005. Another classic image is Ernesto watching his son's fencing lesson: seeing a small version of his defensive self as well as a young life preparing for its own cultural indoctrination. No movie has made the issue of religious hegemony more poignant or irresolvably funny. I am reminded of William Richert's great, futile protestation, "Heredity, take your hands off me!"