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Bernardo Bertolucci: La Strategia
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“Bernardo Bertolucci's La Luna is beautifully shot but somewhat twisted tale. It stars Jill Clayburgh as a recently widowed American opera diva Caterina and Matthew Barry as Joe, her drug addicte …”
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Born in Parma, Italy, the province of Giuseppe Verdi, in 1941, Bertolucci is a product of World War II Europe and everything that might imply. But he's ... a poet, the son of a poet, film critic and friend of controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, so Bernardo's intellectual development would have been along Hegelian-Marxist lines - he says he is a Marxist, he was a communist [2] - and of course he would have socially experienced the residue of Italian Fascism from an early age. In fact, Bertolucci was so absorbed with fascist aspects of his past, that in a five-year period, he wrote and directed three great films exploring his Marxist-Freudian approach to fascism from two perspectives: the reactionary Right, grounded in a ruling elite, namely landed European aristocracy, contrasted against the romantic Left in revolt against authority, usually with grand expectations for the future.
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Bertolucci asserts that Matthew, Theo and Isabelle enter the apartment that late winter as adolescents and emerge as grown-ups. It is not clear that this is so or why it should be so. Becoming an adult involves more than sexual experience, as significant as that may be. It ... implies a coming to terms in some manner or other with aspects of one’s world, including unpleasant and burdensome aspects. Is it not telling that adulthood in the filmmaker’s eyes includes a great deal of sex, playing film games, drinking papa’s most expensive wine and hours of “meaningful” (overwrought and shallow) conversation about art and politics, all carried out in isolation from a growing social upheaval?
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Bertolucci uses sex as character, a motif throughout his films. Sexuality is an assertion of dominance and control in The Conformist, manipulation with each encounter erotic, but oddly lacking emotion. Sex becomes an exploration of unconscious motivations for each character - Clerici's traditional fun-loving wife, can't wait to have babies, while the bisexual power and idiosyncrasies of the professor's wife, the childhood chauffeur's scary pedophilia, indicate decadence among elites, another persistent theme in Bertolucci's films.
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Ebert ... compared Bertolucci’s film to Australian Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), in which the white women simply disappear into the landscape. The Weir film is extremely unsettling because, against plot conventions of that time anyway, there is never any resolution of the school girls’ disappearance into the austere rock formation they visit. This brush with the unresolved unknowable evokes dread. For Americans, 9/11 has made this dread explicit and apocalyptic, and provides motivation to untangle our own illusions and our own “Orientalism.” So, The Sheltering Sky may now be interesting and absorbing in a new way for U.S. audiences, who may be willing to stand some degree of discomfort without so much “boredom”—or its underlying defensiveness.
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