Wednesday 28 November 2018

Bernardo Bertolucci by Chris Hick

Yesterday saw the passing of another of the great directors, Bernardo Bertolucci who died on Monday 26th November at the age of 77. This came the day after another of the greats had passed away, British director, Nicholas Roeg. What both filmmakers had in common was a unique style of filmmaking that led to some unique films. 

Bertolucci was born in Parma, Italy on 16th March 1941 and while, like Roeg, not the most prolific of directors, he made some true classics of cinema. Having made a number of films in his native Italy in the 1960s that were hardly going to set the world on fire, he went on to make Il Conformista (The Conformist) in 1970, a Mussollini era set political crime thriller, it is one of the key Italian films of the 1970s. This was followed a few films and a couple of years later with the then controversial Franco-Italian co-production, Last Tango in Paris (1972). 


Set in Paris and starring Marlon Brando, fresh from his turn as Don Corleone in the Oscar winning The Godfather, with Maria Schneider. It is a film about passion and desire, but is most famous for its steamy scene of anal rape (it involves butter, but I will leave it at that). The film does appear relatively tame today, but is still one of the director’s key films in his oeuvre.


He went on to make the underrated 1900 (1976), an epic story covering the first half of the 20th century in Bertolucci’s home region of Emiliga-Romagna. But it was the more international The Last Emperor (1987), Bertolucci’s most ambitious and biggest project that made him a household name. An epic film in scale it is the story of Puyi, the last Emperor of China who lived in the walled Forbidden City and his growth in an ever changing and challenging China through the 20thCentury. An Anglo-Italian co-production, this film still maintains its epic scale and sumptuous look. For his next few films there was certainly a modern historical travelogue feel to his films: The Sheltering Sky (1990) is set in various African countries, the story of pre-enlightenment Little Buddha (1993), Prince Siddhartha in South East Asia, Brits in Italy in Stealing Beauty (1996) before he went on to make one of his more challenging and frankly most interesting films of his career, The Dreamers (2003).


The Dreamers catches a particular moment in modern French history: namely the student revolt of May 1968. Based off a novel by Gilbert Adair, ‘Holy Innocents’, it is a re-imagining of the writer’s own experiences living in Paris during these heady times. For the film, his character has been transformed from a Brit to American in the shape of the character of Matthew (Michael Pitt). It is February 1968 and he has arrived in Paris at a time when the former war hero, General de Gaulle was the President of France. De Gaulle represented the old order and a more engaged and politically left leaning politik was stirring through University campuses. Matthew has befriended twins Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) who agree that Matthew can stay with them. He is invited to dinner where he meets their English mother (Anna Chancellor) and French father (Robin Renucci), but soon after the parents leave on a trip, leaving the three youngsters to their own devices. The apartment is French bohemian baroque, a little run down and tired, probably symbolising the French state. It is reminiscent of a haunted house in a Mario Bava horror film or bourgeois decadence in a Visconti classic.

The twins had met Matthew at the famous Cinémathèque Française, a key place where the student protests started from. Where else but in France would protest and revolution start from but from an arts centre? The students are protesting the sacking of the Cinémathèque Française director, Henri Langlois by the French Arts Minister, André Malraux who had ceased to fund what he saw as a hot bed of Marxist thinking. Under instructions as to what he should screen for a visiting Soviet dignitary, Langlois refused stating that he was not at the behest of the government. This led to its closure and subsequent protest from the likes of such eminent directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and even Nicholas Ray (the director of Rebel Without a Cause, 1955) from Hollywood, setting the country on a wave of protests throughout Paris and the rest of the country until it reached its climax in May ’68.

After initial scenes which are filmed at the location of the Cinémathèque Française much of the next hour or so takes place in the apartment. There are three themes that consistently run through the film: Politics, Sex and Cinema. Politics is the glue that unites them all for Bertolucci and indeed for the French nouvelle vague too. In one scene the trio play a game answering questions on cinema. When Matthew gets the answer wrong, his forfeit is to masturbate in front of them. Indeed there are many scenes in the film that are quite daring and the Paris locations and the erotic games recall Bertolucci's earlier film, Last Tango in Paris. Green’s character of Isabelle is quite promiscuous and the film plays with ideas of incest as well as her as a femme-fatale. In another scene Théo demands that Isabelle and Matthew have sex in front of him, leading Matthew to discover that she was in fact a virgin. In time they have trashed the apartment and when the parents unexpectedly return are upset at the state of their home. Isabelle plots to gas them both in an almost Oedipean scene. A sense of agoraphobia almost pervades the film to this point until a their lives are disturbed by a stone thrown through the window. Our trio of characters dare to venture out only to find themselves at the height of the May protests with students and protesters facing off against a militarised CRS (the French anti-riot police) which they join in on.

The May 1968 riots were a part of the zeitgeist (shuddering to use a cliché) that was spreading through the Western world with anti-Vietnam Protests taking place in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, the Prague Spring that led to Soviet occupation and supporting student protests in Milan, Chicago and at Hornsey Art College in support of the Sorbonne. The counter-culture was questioning the old order with the French speaking out against old France and the Republic. Many of the aforementioned filmmakers, Godard and Truffaut were beaten and injured by the CRS riot police during the protests, Jean-Paul Sartre was actively involved and was arrested for civil disobedience. In cinema Godard had made the Maoist tract La Chinoise (1967) and in London One Plus One (1968), (which famously was inter cut with footage of The Rolling Stones recording 'Sympathy for the Devil') , as well as the later Tout va bien (1972), whereas Truffaut made Baisers volés (1968) set during the May turbulence and La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night , 1973). Both these films starred Truffaut regular Jean-Pierre Léaud who appeared in several of his films as the character Antoine Doinel since Les Quatre Cents Coup (1959). Léaud appears in The Dreamers, both in documentary footage during May '68 giving a speech and appears as an older self in the film. Léaud's appearance also links with Bertolucci as he had co-starred in Last Tango in Paris. 

The Dreamers, Bertolucci's penultimate film (his last being Me and You, 2012) is critically not his best received film, but is one of his most interesting. Some of the dislike met out to the film is probably to do with the dislike-able, spoilt and self-indulgent nature of the protagonists. However, the film is a celebration of the power of cinema and especially those of the nouvelle vague which I would argue act as a tribute to France and a period of failed revolution that nevertheless changed the direction of France, showing that a director in his then 60s still had the faculty to make great art.
Text by Chris Hick 2018

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