Leap into the Void

Bellocchio's quirky subversion of bourgeois family values revives all the strengths of two earlier works (Fists in the Pocket and In the Name of the Father) with its tale of a middle-aged, incestuously puritanical judge (Piccoli) gradually destroyed by the hesitant love affair between his sister (Aimée) and a young anarchist actor. The treatment is perhaps less cruel, but Bellocchio continues the stylisation and claustrophobia of his earlier images - and with them the debt to the wise, angry, anti-patriarchal cinema of Jean Vigo.