Why are so many great directors’ final films such a disappointment? At what point does the artist lose touch with the zeitgeist? It’s a recurrent theme. Bertolucci’s film feels like an attempt to keep up with the ‘yout’. The thing is, when he made Before the Revolution, he was the ‘yout’. His final film feels like a desperate attempt to rediscover what it felt like to be young, knowing that the train has long gone. Perhaps, if the film acknowledged, this, if it came from a more transparent place, it wouldn’t have felt so off-centre. All the old tropes are there: a disillusioned youth, trying to find meaning in his life; a hint of incest; a flirtation with the darkness at the edge of society. But the fire has gone, and so too, the budget. This is a small scale film, most of it shot in a basement, with none of the visual flair one normally associates with the director. From IMDB, one learns it was made nearly a decade after his previous film, The Dreamers. Perhaps he accepted the idea of making the film on a reduced budget, just out of the sheer desire to return to a set, to get a taste of the action one last time. Sic transit gloria mundi.
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