CINEMA: Bertolucci’s Homecoming

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Beverly Andrews

LONDON, Aug 27 1996 (IPS) - Italy has changed a lot in recent years, and for the better, according to director Bernardo Bertolucci. So much so, that he decided it was time for him to go back home.

In an interview with IPS during a recent visit to London, the director explained that after filming outside his home country for years he became “a little homesick”. So he “started wondering whether the reasons for my leaving Italy – the ancient, endemic system of corruption, the bribery, the horrible smell of cynicism – had disappeared.

“And I found that since the changes at the start of the 1990s, they had in fact largely disappeared.”

In Italy nowadays, he said, “there’s this union between the centre and the left, like the ideal of the 1970s of catholic and communist workers striking together – which makes me very optimistic.

“So I thought, I can go back.”

Bertolucci then considered filming Italy’s history, starting in 1945, the end of World War II, and going to the end of this decade – “to try and understand how we got to where we find ourselves now”.

That film, he said, would have become a large epic, like the ones he has done so successfully: ‘The Last Emperor’, ‘Little Buddha’ and ‘The Sheltering Sky’.

“But then, because I’d done these three epics, I thought, no, I cannot. I preferred to do something very light. And what could be lighter than a story of a 19-year-old girl on holiday?”

That’s how Bertolucci decided to make ‘Stealing Beauty’, a film on a young American girl on holidays in Italy.

The story is very light indeed: the girl, Lucy, stays in a rustic villa in the heart of Chianti. Her mother having committed suicide, Lucy is in search of her father. During her stay in Italy, she loses her virginity.

Lucy is played by Liv Taylor. As Bertolucci explained at the launch of the film here, he “interviewed loads of girls for his part. None of them were quite right.

“Then I met Liv in New York. It was impossible to tell how old she was. One moment she was a little girl and the next she was Ava Gardner.”

Many critics have said that in the virgin Lucy, Bertolucci has created an overly romantic view of what young people are like today. The director sees his view as realistic though.

“Faced with a desert of political and moral values, young people are coming to place more emphasis on their sexual identity. For my generation virginity was something which you got rid of as soon as possible so you could get on with the glorious revolution. Today’s youngsters are much more cautious.”

Bertolucci’s film career stretches back to the early 1960s when he worked as an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1962 he directed his debut film called ‘The Grim Reaper’. It was the story of a slum murder told through the accounts of each suspect.

He followed that in 1964 with ‘Before the Revolution’, where he explored the sexual and political dilemmas of a middle-class youth unable to escape the confines of his middle class upbringing. The film offended many catholics and the film was ultimately given an ‘escluso’ classification, which meant that catholics were forbidden to see it.

Bertolucci followed this with what is perhaps his most celebrated film, ‘The Conformist’, the story of a fascist haunted by the memory of childhood sexual abuse. In this film, he collaborated for the first time with legendary cameraman Vittorio Storaro.

The film which introduced Bertolucci to a wider international audience was the notorious ‘Last Tango in Paris’ which starred Marlon Brando. The film’s depiction of graphic sexuality for the first time in a mainstream feature overshadowed its moving message on grief.

After the scandal of ‘Last Tango’, Bertolucci moved back to safer grounds with his first epic ‘1900’ starring Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu. The film was a success and established a blue print for many of the sweeping epics which were to follow.

‘The Last Emperor’, set in China, was awarded with eight Oscar Awards in 1987.

But Bertolucci denied that this remarkable success influenced the films he subsequently did.

“I don’t feel that the Oscars conditioned me in any way,” he said. “I didn’t feel under any obligation to follow ‘The Last Emperor’ formula, simply to get results.”

‘Stealing Beauty’, despite a lukewarm reception at the Cannes Film Festival, has done well in America and looks set to repeat that feat in Europe. Its quiet tale of a search for a father seems to have found a resonance with audiences and proves that epics are not necessarily the only way for Bertolucci to achieve commercial success.