Film Fete: 'In the Name of the Father':Scene Is Italian Boys' School Run by Priests Another Individualistic Movie by Bellochio
The New York Times Roger Greenspun
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There is a sequence about halfway through Marco Bellocchio's "In the Name of the Father" during which a group of upper-form Italian prep school boys prepare for their nightly recreation hour. Dressed in dark uniforms, they solemnly climb a long, dim staircase. And while the priests who are their masters gaze sadly down at them from windows and niches, like paintings framed in centuries of patient grief, each boy approaches a carved portrait bust of the school's honored founder and spits at it— as hard as he can—until spittle drips from its noble aquiline nose.To catch all the spirit of Bellocchio's film one needs to see it all. But this sequence, with its intricate interweaving of beauty and disgust, its deeply elegiac sense of satire, its gorgeously ceremonial invocation of what it most despises, will do for starts. There is a sense in which the entire movie is an elaborate put-on; its most private moments, theatrically staged demonstrations; and that sense typifies the kind of movie that this director, with three highly individualistic films now to his credit, seems committed to making.Like his "Fists in the Pocket" (1966) and the popular "China Is Near" (1967), Bellocchio's present film deals with the younger members of a relatively closed society from which the crying need— and the ultimate impossibility—is escape. In this case the social unit is a miserable boys' school for rich unteachables run by priests, like a medieval fortress in the midst of a modern city. The movie follows the academic year from the school's opening (a vicious son being deposited by his vile dad) through Christmas recess to the end of the spring term. But its structure is not so much temporal as spatial, or perhaps, spiritual—and "In the Name of the Father" maligns several kinds of father at various removes and at many levels of authority.One student (Yves Beneyton) leads a revolt, ostensibly in the name of science and progress, and he uses the school play—in a brilliant and terrifying and most improbable conceit—as a means of mass persuasion. But he is himself a demagogue, a rational madman, a Frankenstein recruiting monsters — and he is no less evil, though somewhat more potent, than the school's vice rector (Renato Scarpa), who is his only serious adversary.The film thus represents a closed system, in which the lines and the actors may change but the horror remains. "In the Name of the Father" is a work of extraordinary boldness and fantastic invention. But its dramatic limitations are such that the boldness declines into bravado and the invention mostly extends variations on a monotonous theme.However, I can think of a dozen sequences together where the film takes magnificent life, and if any movie could be no more than the sum of its beauties, "In the Name of the Father" would take the prize simply on quantity. With its students locked in their cells each night, its priests in helpless disarray, its kitchen hands in sullen discontent, a mad dog roaming its corridors and a meek assistant master scrawling obscene graffiti on the dining hall walls—Bellocchio's prep school is not quite the perfect image of the prison of our lives. But it is at times an impressive distorting mirror; and at times, a most intensely lyrical freak show."In the Name of the Father" played last night in the New York Film Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

The CastIN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, directed by Marco Bellocchio; photography by Franco di Giacomo; music by Nicola Piovani; produced by Franco Cristaldi; production company, Vides Cinematografica di Franco Cristaldi. At the New York Film Festival, Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center. 115 minutes.Angelo . . . . . Yves BeneytonVice Rector . . . . . Renato ScarpaFranco . . . . . Aldo SassiFranco's Mother . . . . . Laura BettiSalvatore . . . . . Lou Castel