me and you (w&d bertolucci, w. niccolò ammaniti, umberto contarello, francesca marciano)

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. 

1900 (w&d bertolucci, w giuseppe bertolucci, franco arcalli)

There’s a Bertolucci season on at Cinemateca, so this is the second instalment in a mini-Bertolluci binge. Cinemateca projected Novecento over two nights on film, which. during the first part, summoned up a nostalgic memory of the old Cinemateca. One of the projectors had a problem with the sound, which meant the reels had to be changed on the remaining projector that worked, giving a five minute break every twenty minutes or so. Given the slightly jagged nature of Novecento’s edit, this didn’t cause too much grief, although it has to be said that the second part, which flowed effortlessly, was a slightly less taxing viewer experience.

As for the film itself… Several thoughts occurred. Firstly, the seventies really were a golden age of epic filmmaking. The epic hasn’t entirely died (Bela Tarr springs to mind), but the great, sweeping arc of history movie certainly seems to be in abeyance. I would guess that Bertolucci, Angelopoulos, Coppola, Cimino all grew up watching Abel Gance, Renoir and Griffiths and thought, ‘anything they can do, we can do bigger.’ There may not be a lot of political nuance in Novecento, but if you want an example of how cinema can interrogate and represent history, then look no further. The scale of the film and the way in which it reveals the forces that lead to the onset of Mussolini’s fascism, is astonishing. 

On the other hand, there is a kind of crude subtlety (if that’s not a tautology) in the premise of childhood friends from different sides of the tracks, each struggling to get by in their own world, whilst seeking to maintain a friendship that grounds them in a common humanity. De Niro and Depardieu offer up compelling performances and their bromance is convincing. They put flesh and blood on the bones of the somewhat contrived premise. This is undoubtably one of De Niro’s great forgotten performances. (He was on a roll with Taxi Driver, Godfather 2, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull all coming out within a four year period, which must be one of the most fertile acting periods in any career ever). He and Depardieu carry a film which retains its emotional power in spite of obvious issues, presumably to do with finance, in the edit. This is a film that seems to be fuelled by the sheer energy of its participants, (actors, cinematography, music), driving the narrative forwards in spite of its chronological leapfrogs. Novecento is both a testament to the political struggles in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century and the power of cinema to relate those struggles. 

before the revolution (w&d bertolucci w. gianni amico)

If I was looking for a contemporary filmic reference point for Bertolucci’s early, neo-romantic drama, it would be his fellow Italian, Guadagnino’s, Call Me by Your Name. Both films are constructed around the premise of an illicit sexual relationship which profoundly shapes the consciousness of their young protagonists. However, Bertolucci’s film ultimately feels far more transgressive than Guadagnino’s. It recounts the love affair of Fabrizio, a handsome, intellectually confused young man, with his aunt, Gina, a beautiful, slightly tragic figure, who has few qualms about seducing her nephew. There’s one breathless scene, where, with the family falling asleep after dinner, Gina and Fabrizio dance together in front of them. Seeing that they are the only ones awake, they cannot resist the desire to kiss. It’s a protracted kiss, charged with the risk of terrible, instantaneous scandal, filmed in close up, with the audience as conscious of the other people in the room as they are of the lovers, just as they themselves must be. We become complicit in their illicit affair; something which, watching it over fifty years later is still dramatically potent, even shocking, because incest is one of the last remaining taboos. In Italy in the mid 1960s it must have been a coruscating scene to watch.

The film is peppered with remarkable moments such as this, sandwiched between scenes with slightly less convincing dialogue. Whenever Fabrizio attempts to articulate his pre-revolutionary, bourgeois angst, he comes across as a vapid, spoilt youth. But when he is living this precipitous affair with his aunt, he becomes an audacious radical. Bertolucci’s film rightly puts its finger on the Chekhovian premise that the revolution begins at home, with the decisions people take in their most intimate moments pre-figuring political change. (Something Foucault was also writing about). In many ways, Before the Revolution is a parlour piece, a melodrama set in a provincial town. Parma is beautifully filmed, and there’s even the hint of an eco-message in the Antonioni-esque closing sequence, set in marshes which are soon to be sold off and drained. However, this is a parlour piece endowed with all the recourses of cinema, with some remarkable camerawork and a compelling score by Ennio Morricone. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the striking crowd scenes, which depict day-to-day Parma life, and then zoom in to pick out the protagonists as they search for one another in the madding crowd: at the same time part of the mass, but also alienated individuals trying to find in one another a reason to overcome the banality of bourgeois living. 

This mash-up of the intimate, domestic family drama, (echoes to be found also in Coppola and Scorsese), allied to an epic approach, make for a film which feels as though it’s talking about its generation, even if it does so before, as the title states, the fireworks of the revolution are set off. 

the conformist (d. bertolucci)

It's been a quiet weekend. Today I took a stroll in Regents Park with my sister. I've read three scripts, done some washing, watched a bit of the rugby with Mr Blue and sat in Carluccio's with the same discussing the venn diagrams of relationships.

And in the middle there somewhere, yesterday, I saw this weirdly lit 1970 adaptation of a Moravia novel. The Conformist.

Carluccio's, where we retreated after seeing the film, felt like an extension of the movie. The lights adorned with strong primary shades. The waitresses in possession of a european prettiness. Two balding men at a neighbouring table with a Derrida tome on the table. To be replaced by a well-built woman who slices her spaghetti with a knife before consuming. Where we discussed relationships and ageing in a pleasantly esoteric manner. Bertolucci land, where nothing really seems to mean all that much, and it's all cloaked in a veneer of mildly distracting weirdness....

The film. I enjoyed the storytelling of the first half hour. Since all I seem to do these days is read other people's stories, it was refreshing to see how he'd chopped Moravia's text up and put it back together in a fractured dance. And then they all got to Paris and for some reason the director lost his nerve and the last hour was plaintively linear. The lighting seemed like a prefigurement of Saturday Night Fever. The imminent gaudiness of the seventies about to rain its dayglo patterns on film star faces. The girls... similar precursors of a decade of hair care and decadent innuendo.

At some point a critic has to hold up his hands and say it just doesn't work for him or for her. That's what happened with The Conformist. A book I savoured in a North London garrett in the weeks before a fateful trip to Italy, steeped in that subtle Italian equation of persona as opposed to soul, societal conformity jousting with apocalyptic desire, transfigured on screen, (in a supposed masterpiece), into a gaudy display of a director's gusto which sometimes paid off but eventually turned into a kind of gloopy mess. (How the austere brilliance of the Rome office scenes contrast with the mundane obviousness of the Parisian scenes). Bertolucci supposedly released from the shackles of his mentor, Godard, but actually floundering around in his wake, all the moves with none of the meaning.

So, as this is about the film and not the book, and also about my aesthetic response to the film in this day and age and not its significance in another day and age, nor the resonance of a political idealism which now seems as shallow as Clerici's own, let's leave it with the heretical notion that this film, The Conformist, has for reasons which some will know and others will deny, been over-rated. And if you want to enjoy the 1970's Bertolucci experience without having to sit through the film, save a few bob and buy yourself one of those fancy coffees in Carluccio's.