Name a
filmmaker who maybe, maybe, spent a shade too long in psychoanalysis; Woody
Allen’s name might spring to mind. But it was true, by his own admission, of
Bernardo Bertolucci, who famously greeted the winning of a barrel-load of
Oscars with the quip that Hollywood had become, for him, ‘the big nipple.’ He
couldn’t stop himself.
That same
year, 1988, John Boorman had done the rounds of Hollywood functions because he,
too, was promoting a movie with multiple nominations; and in his diaries
Boorman recorded a wonderful exchange with his fellow auteur. He asked Bertolucci
quite why he’d done so much time on the analyst’s couch, and the reply was, as
I recall: ‘Because I kept on making beautiful movies and nobody went to see
them.’
The thing
is, you can see Bertolucci making that joke, in all candour, with the delighting,
semi-rueful smile that travelled halfway up the side of his face.
But, of
course, not nearly so neglected! Bertolucci was, is, will be famous for Last
Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. The Conformist is widely considered his
masterpiece, one of the all-time great movies. Before the Revolution and The
Spider’s Stratagem are hugely admired. Much else in his body of work is
extraordinary and brilliant. That’s plenty, no?
It’s The
Conformist for me, too. It’s about politics, about Italy and fascism; but it’s
about cinema, too – helplessly, ravishingly. Bertolucci would own up, candidly,
to a case of ‘the disease of cinephilia.’ In this movie, he made plain, you
could see Ophuls, Sternberg, Welles. But you saw Godard, too – the father he
offended by taking Paramount’s money to distribute the film. You saw Bresson: Bertolucci,
who venerated the great man, cast Dominique Sanda fresh from Une Femme Douce
because, he quipped, he wanted to steal one of Bresson’s virgins, put her in a
beautiful dress and take her to a party.
Bertolucci
was always honourable towards his great collaborators, too, as on The
Conformist: the visual powerhouses Vittorio Storaro and Nando Scarfiotti, and Franco
‘Kim’ Arcalli, who helped him reconstruct The Conformist in the cutting-room (‘an
ex-Partisan, fantastic guy!’ as Bertolucci would describe him to years later.)
Bertolucci’s cinema has given me so many more joys: that
apartment in Last Tango in Paris, with its strange Christo-like shroud; the
umbilical links in Luna, and the pop-culture joys of Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and
Matthew Barry’s café-jukebox dancing; the toast in The Last Emperor to ‘The Lord
of Ten Thousand Years!’; The Sheltering Sky’s heartbreaking scene between
Malkovich and Winger on the rocky plateau, that film’s heartbreaking score, its
exquisite ending with Paul Bowles…
Bertolucci’s ambitions were so grand and romantic, his
conception of sex and politics so heady, that you’d be hard-hearted not to see
the life-enhancing charm of them, even if he sometimes bit off more than he
could chew. If I remember it correct he wanted Novecento to be
co-founded by Hollywood and Mosfilm, with US and Soviet actors in the two
leads, as a means of engineering a little creative détente. That plan was doomed,
a shade too schematic: as is any cinema, in my view, that tries to score points
based on theories, that wants to editorialise rather than dramatise. Some of
Bertolucci’s movies aren’t as dramatic as they ought to be; but they’re always
ravishing.
When I
was a research student at the British Film Institute in the mid-1990s I wrote a
thesis on Nando Scarfiotti and his work, to which Bertolucci, with great grace, contributed
in loving memory of his friend and colleague. I met him on the Tuscan
location of Stealing Beauty, where he was commanding matters with the charisma I expected. Darius Khondji was the DP – no mean substitute for Storaro, who
wasn't available, as he sometimes hadn't been ever since he was, in Bertolucci’s impish words,
‘unfaithful to him with Coppola’ for Apocalypse Now.
I will never ever forget
that day, that conversation, all I saw on Bertolucci’s show. I have one or two friends who are filmmakers, and I like to
address them as ‘maestro,’ jocularly, but in respect, too – because it’s very
hard to make a good film. Bertolucci made some great ones, and when I watched
him make cinema I was so struck by the easy way in which he was addressed repeatedly
by his collaborators as ‘maestro.’ He certainly was. Buona notte e buona fortuna, maestro.
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