Bertolucci: virtuoso filmmaker of the sparkling spectacle and fatal relationships

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci died Monday of a lung cancer at the age of 77 years. He became infamous for his doomed novel The Last Tango in Paris (1972) and famous for his epic The Last Emperor who won nine Oscars in 1987; himself, he won Academy Awards for Best Direction and Best Screenplay

The Last Emperor is a grandiose and dazzling performance of the last Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, the Japanese puppet, re-educated in Communist China . An anti-hero like Bertolucci liked to see: introverted, isolated and without a world through his education in the Forbidden City of Beijings. Bertolucci, an ambitious and ambitious young man, has more than five hours Novecento (1976) already had a brief history of Italian fascism on the basis of two childhood friends: Robert De Niro as a Rich and decadent son, Alfredo and Gerard Depardieu, as a communist farmer's son, Olmo, with the lead role of Donald Sutherland as a perverse brute Attila

Bernardo Bertolucci was born in Parma in 1941 as the poet's son Italian, art historian, professor and film critic Attilio. Initially, he wanted to become a writer, in the image of his father: Bernardo designed for Sergio Leone the history of Once upon a time in the West . But when his father helped to publish Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel, he was hired as assistant to Pasolini's assistant at Accattone (1961). Thus, he entered the world of cinema.

In 1962, Bertolucci was allowed to judge him at age 21 with The Secca Commare on the Murder of a Prostitute. His decisive breakthrough came in 1964 by the autobiographical Prima della rivoluzione slightly influenced, influenced by the new French wave, about a young man from the province who has an incestuous relationship with Aunt Gina while hesitating about the durability of her communist ideals. , given his bourgeois life safely. This friction of great dreams and ideals against personal interest and sexual desire came back more often: a confrontation of Marx and Freud, of the external and internal world.

Bertolucci shocked the Italian press at a press conference in French to invest: it was according to him the true language of the film. But although Paris is more than a backdrop for his films, his passion for the new wave is less stubborn than his Marxism. Novecento with his decadent empires, his cynical empires, his cattle fascists and his peasants waving red flags, now resembles in part a communist agitprop. It also explains that China, which opened to the world in the 1980s, allowed him to film The Last Emperor in the Forbidden City: Emperor Pu Yi ends after a hard but Rehabilitation as a humble communist

Hollywood nevertheless entrusts Bertolucci with big budgets to make his world a cinema. Bertolucci's virtuosic style, sometimes leaning towards a beautiful blur, aroused confidence: he loved warm colors, sumptuous sets, dramatic lighting, broad and epic shots and swirling mass scenes – all that was very chic, described by his usual cameraman, Vittorio Storaro.

In 2002, Bertolucci admitted to having experienced the fall of the wall in 1989 as a great loss, because "we could not dream big, utopian" anymore. His career ended with a glide in the nineties. The Meanders The Sheltering Sky (1990) – about a couple who wants to meet after a great adventure but dissolves in the Sahara – has proven to be a costly failure. With the kitsch Buddhist epic The Little Buddha (1993), Bertolucci gave the impression of forcing himself in search of a grand new vision

He found himself somewhat with more modest films about teenagers who discover themselves sexually. On the tablecloth The flying beauty (1996), in which the young Liv Tyler loses her virginity in Tuscany, followed much more The Dreamers (2003), in which an American student – Bertolucci has often written The Displaced Americans – in the context of the Paris riots of 1968, find themselves in a suffocating and fatal triangle with a brother and a French sister: a sexual revolution in a revolution. In his latest film, Io e Te (2012), an introverted teenage brother and his dependent half-sister retreat completely into their inner world: a cellar.

[1945] 19659004] Meritorious films that the two films with which Bertolucci reached an artistic peak in the early 1970s could make no noise, with traumatized and marveled anti-heroes in the main role. In Il Conformista (1970), an opportunist disciple helps the fascist regime of Mussolini to murder his professor who fled to France and to the woman he loves. Successor The last Tango in Paris was a worldwide scandal, banned in Italy for years, elsewhere by censorship. Marlon Brando – in part a tragic hero, in part a cynical fighter – begins as an elderly widower of a woman who has committed suicide, a consciously insensitive and strictly anonymous relationship with a seemingly empty and disinterested young woman.

Almost 45 years later The last Tango in Paris became a scandal for the second time. When recording the famous "butter scene" of an anal rape, then Marlon Brando, aged 48, attacked actress Maria Schneider, 19 years old and inexperienced, in Applying butter on her buttocks: an overwhelming tactic to elicit a "pure reaction" of humiliation. . "I wanted the girl's reaction, not the actress," Bertolucci said in 2013 against Twan Huys at his College Tour . Schneider found himself in a spiral of rage, addiction and suicide attempts and later described Bertolucci as a nasty sweaty manipulator. He himself confessed in [College College] that he felt guilty but that he regretted nothing. When this clip entered Hollywood in late 2016, it caused a collective anger. In retrospect, it turned out to be the harbinger of the Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo scandal, which erupted three-quarters of a year later.