La LunaArguably more provocative than Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci's La Luna is a compelling cinematic excursion into the realm of the maternal which the director describes as a reaction to ten years of psychoanalysis in which he was fixated on all things paternal.
Jill Clayburgh is Caterina, an American opera singer on tour in Italy with her teenage son, Joe (Matthew Barry). Clayburgh, the fantastically talented actress who died in 2010, and is best remembered for roles in films such as Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1978), gives an extraordinarily fearless performance in this taboo-busting family drama.
Bertolucci may have spied an adolescent, Jean-Pierre Léaud-like insolence (reminiscent of that actor's debut in Truffaut's 1959 classic 400 Blows) in newcomer Barry, who is remarkably assured in a challenging role. In an episode as amusing as any of young Antoine Doinel's capers, Joe's carnal and filmic teen dreams fuse together bewilderingly, when he and a would-be girlfriend get down to some clumsily rushed teen petting in a Rome cinema during a matinee of Marilyn Monroe's Niagara.
Bertolucci used Verdi's operas as a soundtrack to his earlier films (Macbeth in Before the Revolution, Rigoletto in Spider's Stratagem) and here uses A Masked Ball to emphasise the drama, staging the rehearsal of a scene from the opera at the Baths of Caracalla as part of an exhilarating set piece that closes the film. The sequence provides a (literal) performative space in which mother, father and son are finally united in an ambiguously defined way, as is Bertolucci's predilection, where each character arrives as best they can at their own hard-won self-awareness and acceptance.
New 35mm print.
"Impeccable camerawork [by Vittorio Storaro].a film that rivals Bertolucci's best work" - Channel 4 Film
