Bernardo Bertolucci: The Last Taboo
It is a commonplace that movies aren’t what they used to be. “I’ll tell you what I see here in the heart of the Empire, in Hollywood,” says the 38-year-old Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in the following interview.” There’s a lot of energy, a lot of money…But I really think that there aren’t a lot of ideas and not a lot of good movies around. There’s an inverse proportion between the excitement and the result, money and ideas.”
The often-repeated explanations for this decline-blockbuster mentality on the part of producers, a failure of creative will on the part of writers and directors, a lack of interest in serious and experimental films on the part of a television-brainwashed audience–are probably true. And aside from certain films from Germany. Soviet Georgia and Australia, the Seventies–not only in Hollywood but throughout most of the world–have been a lean period for original and risk-taking motion pictures.
But Bertolucci’s eighth and newest film, Luna, is a work of such intensity and cinematic brilliance that, watching it, one feels that one is witnessing a reawakening of the possibilities of cinema. Simply, the story concerns a world-famous opera star named Caterina (Jill Clayburgh) who, after the death of her husband, moves with her 15-year-old son, Joe (Matthew Barry), from their Brooklyn Heights home to Rome, where he gets hooked on heroin.
Once Caterina accidentally discovers Joe shooting up, they become entangled in a series of lacerating, incestuous confrontations as they rediscover each other and recover their pasts. And in the final scene, a rehearsal of Verdi’s ‘The Masked Ball’ on the open-air stage of Caracalla, Joe, his mother and his real father are brought together in a dramatic restitution–a kind of sacred marriage–that reunites son and parents, anima and animus, art and life.
Luna, however, hardly obeys classical unities, for it is, in a sense, a dream about a dream (the original dream being the first few minutes of the film–a remembrance of the sun and the moon, the son and the mother). Bertolucci uses the camera as an unconscious dream observer that spies as it travels in and out of the events and lives of the film (ravishingly photographed by Vittorio Storaro).
But it is a dream based on certain realities. “The virgin and the whore!” Bertolucci exclaims. “For Italian Catholics, all women are whores except the mother and the sister. It’s a fait accompli in Italian culture.”
And with intuition, passion, outrage and irony, Bertolucci takes the cultural clichés of films like Marriage Italian Style and Wifemistress and turns them inside out. Avoiding the nostalgic reverie of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Piano,” the subversive, guilt haunted elaboration of Georges Bataille’s novel Ma Mere’ or the elegance and delicacy of Louis Malle’s film Murmur of the Heart, Bertolucci in ‘Luna‘ confronts the incest taboo–as do all the above works–in order to explore and explode it. At the same time, he has taken his obsessions about sexuality–especially the ambiguous attractions of homosexuality–and the family, which he had previously explored in Before the Revolution, The Spider’s Stratagem, The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and pushed them very far and courageously down the line in his newest work.
“I don’t know what the movie is all about,” Bertolucci told me when I visited him one mid-August afternoon in Los Angeles. “Maybe we should talk about it and I’ll find out.”
Let’s begin at the beginning of the film, with the first two little scenes–a memory of the sun, a memory of the moon.
The point of departure is the prologue, when Joey’s a baby and Caterina’s a young woman. To me, it’s like a dream, which is later forgotten by the characters and the audience. There are just these few minutes in the life of a 14-month-old baby. We see his mother feeding him with honey. He nearly suffocates, the honey is so sweet, and then we see the shadow of a man. Caterina puts a record on the phonograph, and she and this man dance.
The baby can’t attract her attention–it’s as if she’s forgotten him. He’s crying, and he doesn’t see the dancers very well because they’re a silhouette against the sun. They’re dancing, but it’s really the primal scene. And for the baby it’s like a war dance–the mother is shouting, the man has a knife in one hand and a fish in the other. And they don’t look at him.
Next, the reason for the film’s title: you see the baby in a basket on a bicycle. It’s night, and his mother is riding the bicycle, and he looks up at her, sees her face and the full moon in the sky, and he confuses the two. The face of the mother is young, the face of the moon is ageless…This is one of my first memories–the bicycle and the moon–and I wanted to find out why I remembered it, and to discover something about the relationship between the son and the mother.
Maybe that’s why I made Luna. The prologue is extremely important for the rest of the movie because it contains all of its elements. And afterward, it’s as if the film is trying to analyze the dream…But actually, I feel very split about this idea. I believe that psychoanalysis is important to Luna, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s a psychological movie. The movie gravitates between melodrama and psychoanalysis. By that I mean that the characters are either epical-lyrical or are determined by their subconsciouses.
Perhaps this is what gives the effect of watching someone’s dreams…
Yes, without knowing who’s dreaming. Luna is just a word, a magic one, by means of which everyone can project his or her own dream. The moon, of course, is a very rich symbol, but the only reference to it I’d accept is the simplest one: just as the moon has two faces, so every character and situation in the film has two faces–that which appears and that which is hidden.
There seems to be an obsession in your films with what Freud called the “family romance”–father, daughter, mother, son.
You mean I’m a family freak? I think so, in a way. Because it’s hard to grow up, and so one stays in connection with the sweet hell of the family. But the deep reason is…as the Jewish mother says to her son: Oedipus shmoedipus, as long as you love your mother! So there’s that deep, uncontrollable level operating here, but on another level I think that the family is a way of keeping in touch with the past, while our consumer society tries to disconnect us from it in order to sell us more and more stuff.
But by focusing on what is repressed–the early family memories–you discover, or recover, what most families don’t want to confront.
I had a screening in L.A. for people from Twentieth Century-Fox and a few friends. In general, they loved the movie, but when it was over, they found it difficult to say anything–it hit them in the stomach.
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