Cinema: An Epic Century

1900

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci

This $8 million epic, Bertolucci’s first effort since Last Tango in Paris, is a fabulous wreck. Abundantly flawed, maddeningly simpleminded, 1900 nonetheless possesses more brute poetic force than any other film since Coppola’s similarly operatic Godfather II. If Bertolucci irritates as much as he dazzles, he never bores: his extravagant failure has greater staying power than most other directors’ triumphs.

Happily, American moviegoers will soon get an opportunity to judge 1900 for themselves. For many months the film’s future has been jeopardized by a dispute between its director and Producer Alberto Grimaldi, who could not come to terms over its running time. Bertolucci has now cut 1900 from 5½ hours to four without substantially altering its impact or scope—or for that matter, remedying its built-in weaknesses. Last week, on the eve of the new version’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Paramount Pictures announced that it would distribute the briefer movie nationwide.

In 1900, Bertolucci recaps most of 20th century Italian history for the primary purpose of preaching doctrinaire Marxism. Whatever one’s politics, the bombast is often hard to take: the writer-director’s presentation of class warfare has the subtlety of a B western, and he willfully compromises the dramatic structure of 1900 to underscore his dialectic. Yet the movie does frequently take flight—whenever the director’s fevered cinematic imagination overrules the Pavlovian reflexes of his radical conscience.

1900 ‘s story focuses on two best friends, born on the first day of the century in the rural Po Valley: Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the son of the area’s leading landowner, and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), a peasant who works the estate. During the film’s first and better half, Bertolucci lyrically propels his heroes through the rituals of young manhood: they discover the meaning of sex and money, search for love and adjust to the passing of their family patriarchs (Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden). As Alfredo and Olmo grow older, their personalities are increasingly shaped by the volatile social forces that remade Italy during and between the World Wars. Eventually their isolated agrarian community becomes a microcosm of a nation battered by Fascist, socialist and industrial revolutions.

For all its historical themes, 1900 ‘s strongest motifs are visual. Bertolucci organizes the film around the seasons of the year and provides a voluptuous emotional texture wrought from pastoral sun light, blood, mist and excrement. Though much of 1900 has the majesty of Renaissance art, many of its images are erotic or terrifying. In one typically disturbing scene, the director reveals his views on sexual exploitation by sending his two leads to bed with a lovely village laundress who proves to be epileptic. Later, when the Blackshirts come to power, the movie’s principal villains (Donald Sutherland and Laura Betti) rape a young boy and smash him to a gory pulp. Even Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties did not evoke Fascism’s evils with this much ferocity.

Unfortunately, Bertolucci’s grand theatrics are of limited use when 1900 ‘s second half devolves into good-guys v. bad-guys melodrama. Major characters who do not fit precisely into the director’s polarized political scheme (notably the weak patrician liberals played by De Niro and Dominique Sanda) fade out as the film’s narrative gives way to propagandistic pageant. Crucial scenes that might resolve the script’s tortuous human relationships never materialize. By the time 1900 reaches its flag-wav ing Liberation Day climax, the sloganeering and confusion are almost unbearable. Even then, all is not lost: Bertolucci abruptly and wisely segues from the festivities to an epilogue, set in the present, that brings the enormous film full circle. Not everyone will have the patience to stay with 1900 to its indelible final cut, but for years to come, those who love film will savor and analyze each exasperating moment. — Frank Rich