In the kind of double bill any actress would trade her residuals for, Jill Clayburgh, 35, who rose to prominence in Semi-Tough and An Unmarried Woman, stars in two wildly different new films: a dark European drama and a light Hollywood comedy.
Luna
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Screenplay by Giuseppe Bertolucci, Clare Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci
When a European director makes a film in English, the result is almost always disaster: Truffaut, Antonioni, Bergman, Visconti, Wertmuller have all come to grief when straying from their mother tongues. But Bertolucci, who once broke down the limits of propriety in Last Tango in Paris, has now crashed through the language barrier as well. With the crucial collaboration of Jill Clayburgh, he has made a movie in English without sacrificing any artistic integrity. Indeed, Luna may be his most controlled and personal film to date.
For the first time Bertolucci has unloaded the ideological baggage that seemed superfluous to The Conformist and Last Tango and overwhelmed 1900. Though the director's true subject has always been erotic passion, he has usually tried to obscure that fact by littering his movies with Marxist and Freudian bromides. There is no such posturing in Luna. Bertolucci deals directly with his real obsessions; his film is a lucid and uninhibited journey to the outer limits of human behavior.
Those limits are defined—quite graphically—as incest, drug addiction and ambisexuality. The practitioners of these diverse sports are Caterina (Clayburgh), a recently widowed American opera star, and her androgynous 15-year-old son Joe (Matthew Barry). During the course of a summer singing tour through Italy, the wealthy mother and the spoiled boy carry on a tortured relationship that might well shock the cast of La Dolce Vita. Obscene screaming matches and violent brawls quickly give way to grueling sequences featuring heroin injection and masturbatory sex. The film's dramatic structure is built around the secrets the characters keep from each other: there is more than one Oedipal affair in Luna.
Why is Bertolucci troubling us with these decadent people? It is not to create a morality play. The director does not ask us to care about his characters or even to judge them; they are only instruments to make us share his vision of the world. As always, Bertolucci owes a lot to Verdi, whose life and work is invoked here even more than in 1900. The director believes that life takes on its fullest meaning when it is lived at the intensely passionate pitch of grand opera. By sheer cinematic force, he seduces us into sharing his perverse, voluptuous sensibility.
Luna's images are so hypnotic, erotic and beautifully shot (by Vittorio Storaro) that we enter the movie's unpleasant milieu easily and remain captivated throughout. While the film is full of golden Parma landscapes, the dominant visual fixture is the moon: it is the film's metaphor for characters whose mysterious dark sides only gradually reveal themselves. In Bertolucci's brilliant climax, set at an open-air opera rehearsal, his artis tic conceits all converge. As the camera constantly shifts its point of view, we see that Luna 's events form a different drama—or opera—from each player's perspective. Only the moon, hovering above, can know the total picture.