Cinematheque Ontario presents - Bernardo Bertolucci

Cinematheque Ontario presents, beginning Jan 6th, a retrospective of the films of Italian director Bernardo Bertoluccci.  Bertolucci had his influences in Pier Paolo Pasolini having worked with him of ACCATTONE and Sergio Leone, whom he helped script ONE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

Bertolucci broke into fame with his controversial Marlon Brando vehicle LAST TANGO IN PARIS and gained acceptance in Hollywood with the blockbuster THE LAST EMPEROR.  He also won the Oscar for Best Director for the film which also went away with the Best Picture Oscar.  But his truly best films remain IL CONFORMISTA and THE SPIDER’S STRATEGM.  All these films as well as his early works will be screened, including the massive 1900.

For complete listing of films, program, venue and ticket pricing, check the cinematheque ontario website at:
http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (Italy 1964) ***
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci’s second film is as puzzling as it is interesting.  The film is the study of youth coming-of-age in a climate that is conflicting, aggressive and confusing.  An uncomfortable Fabrizio is engaged to a higher class girl Clelia.  Bertolucci paints a grim picture of class differences that exist both in the city structure and social norms.  Fabrizio begins an affair with his older aunt while his best friend who he mentors dies suddenly from drowning.  His conflicting views of life are not helped when he witnesses the aunt sleeping around.  But Bertoucci’s film leads nowhere primarily because his protagonist never settles down and worse of all has a teacher and Marxist mentor by the name of Cesare who has no redeeming qualities.  The film is watchable but rolls along with as much confusion as poor Fabrizio’s life.  Bertolucci has an odd style and he is game of experimenting with everything including spats of colour in an otherwise black and white film.

BESIEGED (Italy/UK 1998) **
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

This is Bertolucci’s romance where nothing much really happens on screen and the camera focuses on the body of Thandie Netwon as if she were the new Goddess of cinema.  English actor David Thewlis plays an English pianist/composer living in Rome. Thandie Newton plays his housekeeper, an African refugee whose husband is a political prisoner in Africa. The pianist becomes smitten with her and winds up pawning or selling everything he owns (including his most precious possession, a Steinway grand piano) in order to help get her husband out of jail. In the end, the husband is freed and joins his wife, but the night before his arrival she has finally slept with the Englishman.  How Newton ends up from state 1 to the final state is up to the imagination of the audience as Bertolucci provides only brief hints of what could have happened.  BESIEGED is slow moving and a lot of events rarely make any sense or purpose, depending on how one looks at it.  But such is Bertolucci’s style of his romances.

IL COMFORMISTA (Italy/France/W Germany 1970) *****
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Easily Bertolucci’s best film or even arguably one of the best 10 films of all time!  Subtle, cinematic, sexy, thrilling and suspenseful, THE CONFORMIST tells of the mix feelings of Marcello Clerici (Jean Louis Trintignant) as he deals with his part in the assassination his former college professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). A frequently returned segment is the interior of a car driven by Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) as the two of them pursue the professor and his wife (Dominique Sanda).  THE CONFORMIST is a political film based on the Italian novel of the same name but Bertolucci takes his audience on a personal journey so complex yet personal and brimming of emotions and connotations.  The sets are marvellous and the cinematography short of stunning.  Two segments stand out – one of the sunlight shining through the woods where the assassination takes place and the other with sunlight sifting through the blinds diagonally on to a character on the wall.  The huge empty walls of the government building and the 30’s Fascist art deco add to the film’s atmosphere and doom.  A few images from the film will remain in the mind of cineastes forever – like the image of Dominque Sanda banging on the rolled up window of a car only to realise that the person seating in it is Trintignant, the one who engineered the killing.  Bertolucci brings his film full circle with the protagonist’s meeting with the homosexual (Pierre Clementi) who apparently caused it all.  Again, this segment is up for interpretation which makes the film even ever more brilliant!

THE DREAMERS (Italy/France 2003) *****
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

The voiceover at the beginning of The Dreamers, only the French would house a cinematheque in a palace, heard as pouting blonde American teen Michael Pitt crosses a bridge over the Seine in Paris, a copy of “Cahiers Du Cinema in his jacket pocket—is enough to make the eyes of any film buff swell with tears of nostalgia.  Director Bernardo Bertolucci returns to the city of lovers decades after Last Tango in Paris again to film, or more appropriate create another moving piece of art. The year is 1968.  Understanding the political events taking place in Paris is integral in appreciating the point Bertolucci is trying to put across.  The Cinematheque Francaise (founded to screen classics and masterpieces otherwise unavailable to the public) founder, Henri Langlois has just then been removed by the government and his followers are taking to the streets in rebellion catalyzing other riotous demonstrations by the public.  Scriptwriter Scots Gilbert Adair, adapting his own book, was there at the time as is evident from the clarity of the incidents that occur in the development of the story.  Matthew, played by Michael Pitt (perhaps a younger version of Adair) is in Paris to learn French but the cineaste gets a French education in sexual mind games when he crosses paths with twins Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel).  But it is the changes in idealism, morality and lifestyle of the three dreamers that Bernardo and Adair are more captivated with and it is the interaction of these values with Matthew’s loss innocence that eventually propels the story to its final and arguably destructive conclusion.
It is good to see Bertolucci in complete control of his material.  Those who love the cinema can understand what it means when some of these powerful images appear on screen like the film buff sitting in the first row of the Cinematheque or watching the end credits, the three protagonists imitating their heroes on film and the public fighting for their right to enjoy the freedom of film.  Film lovers can share in the games played - the tossing of a coin can be related to George Raft to tossing one in Scarface or the tribal dance connected to the number performed by Marlene Dietrich in a gorilla suit in Blonde Venus.  The erotica (carefully built up - from the initial scene of Pitt, sitting in his underwear by the telephone slowly dropping his saliva-wet fingers to his genitals to the nude three-some scene) earns the film its restricted rating. 

LOVE AND ANGER (Italy/France 1969) **
Various Directors

This is an artsy film of five short stories by five top European directors including Bertolucci on the theme of LOVE AND ANGER with the contemporary setting of then 1969.  The film is rather dated now in look, theme and expression.  In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman’s assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. Bertolucci’s piece is the segment involving a man, stripped of his identity, dying in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character’s return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.

Bertolucci’s piece is almost unwatchable and one wonders what his aim is.  At one point, he has an actor scratching a door frame with his nails.  If agony is his purpose, he has achieved it by having his audience go through great agony viewing his incomprehensive piece.  Of the 5 stories, Carlo Lizzani’s 1st story is the best, most effective and accessible.  It makes a point without having to contain a story.  Godard’s piece is as confusing as his work ever was and the other pieces are mostly curious but unforgettable bits.

1900 (Novecento) (Italy/France W Germany 1976) ****
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci’s flawed overlong 4-hour plus long epic should be seen for its outrageousness and unforgettable elements. 
The film chronicles two men. Olmo and Alfredo (Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro) born on the same day at the turn of the century, one to a rich landowner and the other the illegitimate son of a farm labourer.  As the padre (Burt Lancaster) screams at the same time he kicks his hunchbacked servant, “There is no difference in men when they are born”, the film goes on to document the class struggle under the rise of Italian fascism as the two men grow up.
The first half of the film has the two as boys and ends with the poor one off to war while the rich is bribed to stay out of the war.  The film finally ends on the Day of Liberation under socialism when the farm labourers have their day.  And revenge!

A lot of screaming is in the movie as over-the-top acting (particularly by Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland as the sadistic murderous foreman) and unforgettable sex scenes (a threesome in which Depardieu’s hand is placed on De Niro’s coc* to give him a hand job.  All this is good and obviously entertaining, but it undermines the seriousness of the subject matter.  Taboo subjects as child abuse and under-aged sex are treated as normal proceedings in the farm.

The result is a vastly entertaining and watchable epic that still gets its message across in its own weird way.

PARTNER (Italy 1969) ***
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

PARTNER is a film takes is more interesting to look at than it really is.  The action takes place right after the student riots just as his other film THE DREAMERS did.  But PARTNER is a film that has no narrative and floats along much like a Godard film.  In fact, many critics claim this is Bertolucci imitating Godard and succeeding as this film bears many traits of a Godard film such as the emotional detachment of the characters, use of sound, anti-narrative and characters bursting out into dialogue.  The protagonist or protagonists (there are two in this case), both played by Pierre Clementi, are a half mad drama teacher and an anarchic more violent character.  They both do meet and the violent one probes the other to more violent tactics, for example in dealing with the current Vietnam War.  Do not expect the film to make any sense, but PARTNER is quite watchable to see Bertolucci do Godard as well as to observe the ideas that he (Bertolucci) throws forth at the audience.