Bertolucci, the discontented | Free Letters

Bertolucci, the discontented ones

Ernesto Diezmartinez

Few filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci (Parma, 1941-Rome, 2018) realize the well-known popular apotheosis that "childhood is fate". Born in a small town on the outskirts of Parma, Bertolucci had a childhood that he himself described years later as idyllic. Son of Attilio Bertolucci, wealthy and prestigious intellectual, also a poet, gave lectures on the history of art and wrote film critics. Little Bernardo grew up surrounded by books – especially poetry – in a big house, with helpful servants and parents. full

At the age of twelve, the young Bernardo had already published his first poems, and a year later, at the age of thirteen, he decided to devote himself to the cinema. Attilio rewarded his eldest son's talent by offering him a 16mm camera at the end of his high school, with which the worried teenager was shooting his first film, a short film starring his younger brother, Giuseppe.

Shortly after, the family settled in Rome, where Bernardo went to study literature and met his first great influence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, that Don Attilio knew very well, since he had managed to publish the 39, one of his novels. Street boys (1955). Pasolini did Don Attilio a favor, taking young Bernardo under his protection, pushing him to publish his first collection of poems. In search of mystery (1962) and inviting him to act as deputy director Accatone (1962), its remarkable prima opera.

A moment ago, I wrote that Pasolini had been his first big influence. In fact, it was the second. The first, which has never been completely shaken, was that of his father, Don Attilio. On the one hand, because the poet, teacher and critic gave his eldest son every possible opportunity to develop intellectually; on the other, because the rebellious Bernardo made the most important decision of his life: leaving the university, giving up poetry, devoting himself to the cinema, as the first and last form of separation from the father . Bertolucci himself confessed in a later interview: when he understood that he was not going to be a great poet and that in this region he would live at the same time. Attilio's shadow, he decided to make films.

The shadow of the father and all that he represents – bourgeois respectability, good taste, patriarchal tradition – would be one of the common themes of his filmography, composed of about twenty films, between fiction and documentary, between short films, long and episodes. for film anthologies. In any case, in his first films, the obvious influence was that of Pasolini and that of his other unofficial mentor, Jean-Luc Godard.

The sterile harvest (1962), Bertolucci's first film was in fact the legacy of Pasolini, who had written the screenplay but decided not to direct it because he was doing it Mamma Roma (1962) with Anna Magnani. Located in the same proletarian scenarios of Accatone, The sterile harvest focuses on the investigation of the murder of a prostitute and not on the procedure of Giallo so common in Italian cinema this decade, but rather in a meditative tone that, moreover, has allowed a series of formal experiences that have led several critics to compare the prima opera of Bertolucci with the Godard cinema.

Bertolucci has removed this obvious influence of Pasolinian / Godardian in his next film, Before the revolution (1964), who with everything and who is based on The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) of Stendhal, has clearly autobiographical hues, because his protagonist is a young bourgeois, intellectual and Marxist, who realizes that even if he considers himself a revolutionary, he can not give up his class condition . . Practiced as "an exorcism" and in order to "clarify" one's own ideological position, in the words of Bertolucci himselfBefore the revolution it is the film with which he made himself known to the filmmaker outside of Italy.

After a Pasolinian / Godardian regression entitled Double (1968), about the novel of the same name by Dostoevsky – and which neither criticizes nor in public – Bertolucci, who had already joined the Communist Party at the same time as he began a serious approach to psychoanalysis, headed The strategy of the spider (1970), based on the history of Borges Traitor and hero theme (1944). Almost immediately, in that same 1970, he made his next film, The conformist (1970), his first and undisputed chef-d'oeuvre.

Bertolucci is a mature man, owner of all his stylistic resources and showing his most cherished thematic interests: the hypocrisy of the Italian bourgeois society of the post-war, a militant and rebellious political stance, the merger of the social revolution with the sexual and a critical exploration of the past, which includes a kind of personal and class exorcism.

The young protagonists of these two films – one who investigates the death of their father, allegedly a heroic anti-fascist fighter, and the decadent official who will prove to be the perfect fascist bureaucrat – are two sides of the same coin, reflections deformed Bertolucci himself and the class to which he belongs. But if these tapes – especially The conformist– provoked discussions about his form and especially about his content, his next feature film, The last tango in Paris (1972), was the one for which, probably, one will remember the most.

Beyond the well-known scandal – did Marlon Brando really inform Maria Schneider? according to herno, but in any case she felt mistreated by "the Communist" Bertolucci, whom he has never forgiven for having traumatized this way, The last tango in Paris It was the very early work of the Italian director, not because it was the most successful – personally, I prefer The conformist o 1900 (1976) – but because it was made at the appropriate politico-cultural moment and has represented and continues to represent, as few films in the history of cinema, a questionable position on power, sex and the role played by male and female (well, with capital letters) in this scenario.

One of the most controversial films in history, namely the chapter devoted by Fernanda Solórzano to this film in his book. Mysteries of the dark room (2017) -, The last tango in Paris It was defended, at the time, not only by Pauline Kael ("the most powerful erotic film ever made"), but also by Molly Haskell herself, who describes in a memorable criticism this degradation to which the young Jeanne is submissive. Maria Schneider also represents her radical liberation from all that others think she should be.

Partly because of the scandal caused by the recording, which was asking too much attention, partly because his next project was an epic and monumental film, 1900 it was published four years later. This is Bertolucci's most openly political film, until that moment, a historical film of more than five hours, shot in the filmmaker's native region and centered on the parallel life of a young bourgeoisie ( Robert de Niro) and a revolutionary peasant (Gérard Depardieu). Again, as in previous work, 1900 it functions as a kind of personal expiation / exorcism, the bourgeois and the revolutionary being both sides of the same coin.

If we except the last and very successful The last emperor (1987) – with which Bertolucci won the Oscar for best director and best screenplay – the reality is that the Italian filmmaker never fully recovered from this prodigious dozen that goes from 1964 to Before the revolution, until 1976, with 1900. It is true that he continued to scandalize the respectable with the Freudian / incestuous melodrama The moon (1979) and which continued to provoke good consciences with political / Freudian satire The tragedy of a ridiculous man (1981), but his subsequent cinema sometimes flirted with the conventional father's film, as the French Nouvelle Vague critic and filmmaker then defined it (for example, Refuge for the love, 1990 and Stolen beauty, of 1996); been a regrettable firecracker that some of us want to forget (Little Buddha of 1993) or, at best, was "sexy, beautiful but disappointing" (David Thomson dixit), as The dreamers (2003) – Although Eva Green made her debut in this film, everything is forgiven.

The best Bertolucci, that of the 60s and 70s, was unfortunate in nature: the one who abandoned the poet not to follow the footsteps of the father, the one who felt sickened by his class privileges, although he also appreciates them. he declared himself enthusiastic about the revolution (social, sexual, political) to better disappoint it, the one that from the outset was intended for auteur cinema but which, as he once said, dreamed of directing such a successful, popular and popular film. like blockbuster What the wind has taken (Fleming, 1939).

Bernardo Bertolucci is represented in these contradictions. These contradictions are also in his cinema. You must come back to it. You must find out.