Marco Bellocchio: Mother love?

Back in the Sixties, Italian director Marco Bellocchio was interested in Marxism and matricide. Roger Clarke finds out if anything has changed

It's been a year that's seen Italy return to the Sixties – the Vatican condemns films like the The Magdalene Sisters with a ferocity not seen since the heyday of Pasolini. And now Marco Bellocchio has weighed in with an "anti-Catholic" film that harks back to his brilliant bourgeois-baiting debut from 1965, Fists in His Pocket, before he dashingly gave up feature film-making for raw politics (and never quite recovered, I have to add).

The new film My Mother's Smile is an outstanding work, well thought-out and sharp as a knife – but not much like his famous, feverish earlier films in its smoothly understated style. It tells the story of a wealthy Italian artist, a default-Marxist and atheist, who suddenly discovers that the Vatican is proposing to make his detested mother a saint. He is approached by various cardinals and their flunkeys, and becomes aware of the full crimson force of Vatican interest suddenly creeping into his usually very secular and sedate life. How is he to deal with the powerful and worldly vested interests that are brought to bear on him, when it becomes quite obvious that his testimony to the commission will play a key role in the process of canonisation? How will he martial his political beliefs, limp after years of neglect and complacency, to fend off their cunning Jesuitical sallies and feints? And just why does he find his young son's religious teacher at school so wildly attractive?

Once Bellocchio was spoken of in the same breath as Bernardo Bertolucci: they both hail from north Italy, are almost the same age, and made a big impact on radical Italian cinema at about the same time in the mid-Sixties. The two directors were also staunch friends of Pasolini. But whereas Bertolucci moved effortlessly into mainstream cinema with Last Tango in Paris in 1972, Bellocchio moved with equal conviction in quite the opposite direction, in 1968 joining the extreme-left Communist Union, the Centofiori, where he renounced film fiction for the clean, cold stab of politically militant cinema. Though he made one more outstanding and impressive film In the Name of the Father – a satire on a Catholic boarding school that shares affinities with Lindsay Anderson's If... and was adored by Pasolini – his international reputation never bounced back from those early glory days where he won prizes at Locarno and Venice. He was seen as a difficult auteur, uncommercial at heart and obsessed with the insular business of Italy. Hardly any of his films have been seen in the UK for the last two decades.

I meet Bellocchio in a large salon of a hotel on Portman Square – one apparently loved by Italian visitors and used by the Italian embassy – and find him looking fit as a fiddle; his hair now grey, his teeth still good. He chooses to speak to me through a translator, even though I later discover he studied in London's Slade School of Art. Perhaps he's forgotten his former fluency – it was 40 years ago.

I soon discover that the political firebrand of former years has been laid to rest. The full-on Marxist radical who launched all those blistering attacks on the family in Fists in the Pocket (1965), party politics in China is Near (1967), the press in Slap the Monster on Page One (1973) and the army in Victory March (1976), has been replaced by something entirely more modern and urbane. "I can talk about my personal ideas but Marxism has little to do with it now," he tells me, without a trace of sadness or regret. "Today politics means administration, either a good or a bad administration, and nobody is talking any more in terms of changing things. The left in Italy is now very divided, as if it doesn't have the strength to form an opposition. No party is now proposing a radical change of anything, and radical change is no longer very interesting to me as an artist."

But some things don't much change in Italy, including men's troubled relationships with their mothers. Bellocchio himself had a strict Catholic upbringing; his father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. And it's rather ironic to learn that his striking debut feature, which features an incestuous family of epileptics whose actions hurtle with Faulknerian inevitability towards matricide, was funded by his family members and shot on family property. Nevertheless, there seems a clear link between his debut and My Mother's Smile.

"There is a deep link," he says, obviously pleased I've mentioned it. "This film is a reflection of the murder of the mother that occurs in Fists. The mad brother we see in a mental institution in My Mother's Smile is, in a certain sense, the hero of Fists." Once Bellocchio identified with that mother-killer. But now Sergio Castellitto, who plays the artist in the new movie, has become his alter ego. The link is underlined by the fact that Bellocchio's own paintings stand in for Sergio's youthful efforts. It's intriguing to find a scene in the movie where the old Bellocchio meets the new Bellocchio. "The attitude of Sergio's character expresses a change in my attitude," he confirms. "I no longer share that sense of extreme rebellion and matricide in order to find out what's real."

What would Pasolini have made of My Mother's Smile, I wonder out loud. Then another thought occurs: maybe this critique of the renewed Catholic enthusiasm for making new saints comes from the heart of a believer? "No, no," Bellocchio insists with a laugh. "I don't believe, though people tell me I'm really very religious, though not in the conventional Catholic sense. As to Pasolini, I knew him well and he liked my earlier films – today, I don't know.

New saints? They are an expression of the times, with the church needing to renew its own image, but with a kind of strategic calculation behind it. Every Catholic household needs its own saint, and these have become like the gods of ancient Rome."

A line from a character called Count Vittorio in China is Near, comes unbidden into my head as we shake hands and part. "I'm no kamikaze for the Socialist Party," Vittorio yells in the movie, "and I don't want to make myself ridiculous!" Perhaps this speaks for Bellocchio, a man who these days looks serenely composed, rather like a cardinal himself, and who deals in forms of ambiguity far removed from his bold, grotesque strokes of youth. In a way he has never done before, he's talking about himself as an artist. Perhaps the lost genius of Italian cinema is due for a magnificent late flowering. Is it too much to hope for?

Marco Bellocchio is nominated for Best Director at this year's European Film Awards which take place in Rome on 7 December