I also thought Besieged a partial return to form, but like Wim Wenders with his former cameraman Robbie Muller, it seems- maybe purely coincidence in both cases- Bertolucci hasn’t hit the heights without Vittorio Storaro. But i can’t really explain his decline, any more than Wenders, whose pretensions may have got the better of him. BB’s 2 favourite films in Sight and Sound’s last poll were Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (there’s an outdoor scene with some reeds in 1900 that brought it to mind at once), an indicator of pretty good taste i’d say.
I think Bertolucci’s been hampered by the general decline of the Italian film industry over the past few decades.
HF: I’m in near complete agreement with you … and THE CONFORMIST is still one of the great films of the last half of the 20th century. But the seeds for the fall were maybe planted there in 1900 — the film was somewhat inflated: in ambition, budget, and running time. Which led to THE LAST EMPEROR. SHELTERING SKY was disappointing (and what great material was there to work with!). STEALING BEAUTY was very thin, but not nearly so thin as THE DREAMERS. And yes, that was a nice moment with the small BESIEGED.
So maybe it is about scale, and about ambitions that flow from big budgets? I see Scorsese as having taken much the same road — from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, New York, New York to what he’s given us over the last decade or so.
Vittorio Storaro has had flourishes without Bertolucci: AGATHA, APOCALYPSE NOW. However, the specific intelligence was missing.
He was under Bertolucci’s skin in THE CONFORMIST as he was not able to be under Carlos Saura or anyone else.
NMOORE: You open a can of worms about Scorsese. I believe that he has run dry. He is trying, brilliantly, to reinvent himself. He has such talent and so many options that he can use everything he’s got to do whatever he wishes. But he has nothing new to say.
I’m glad you started this thread Howard. I’ll tell you precisely what happened to Bernardo Bertolucci. I was wondering myself for over a decade but discovered the answer in an interview with Jean-Louis Trintignant, who starred in The Conformist, which I consider the best finest ever made.
Trintigant and his Conformist co-star Dominique Sanda were set to star in Last Tango in Paris. Trintignant claimed the script to Tango was even better than the one for The Conformist. As fate would have it Marlon Brando met Bertolucci by chance a month before shooting was scheduled. Brando read the script of Last Tango and loved it and Bertolucci dumped Trintignant and eventually Sanda. Bertolucci was so awestruck by Brando’s improvisations in rehearsal that he decided to chuck the script out the window and said that anything Brando comes up with is superior to anything a writer can come up with and in my opinion it’s all been downhill for Bertolucci ever since.
i don’t know. i enjoy “the dreamers”. but i can’t say i’m knowledgeable about his early films. in fact, i dont think i’ve seen any of them.
Yeah Bobby The Dreamers was worthwhile as was Beseiged. If you haven’t seen The Conformist you need to and if you do so and like it then try and track down a film he made the year before for Italian TV titled The Spider’s Stratagem.
Spider’s Strategem needs to be on DVD. The Dreamers was just a lot of Eva Green with no clothes on – nice but a bit dull after a while. 1900 really needs revisiting. It’s an absolute masterpiece, albeit a very flawed one.
The thought of Dominique Sanda in Last tango, seems like a great opportunity that was missed. That would have been something.
I don’t agree with you about “The Sheltering Sky” at all. I think it’s a masterpiece.
Bertolucci suffered the fate of success — bcoming an international director rather than a simple Franco-Italian one. This was inevitable after “last Tango in Paris.” His career is full of ups and downs. On the up side : “La Commare Secca,” “Before the Revolution,” his episode from “Love and Anger,” “Partner,” “The Conformist,” “Last Tango,” “The Last Emperor,” and “The Sheltering Sky.”
On the down side:“Beseiged,” “La Luna,” “Rochelle Rochelle” (aka. “Stealing Beauty”) and “The Dreamers.”
“1900” is somewhere in between as is “The Spider’s Strategem.”
Here’s the Bernardo I love most of all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIrkWjsUy9o&feature=related
I agree with David: The Sheltering Sky is a masterpiece.
Ah ha, David, The Sheltering Sky is indeed a masterpiece, and a rare thing it is to come across someone who thinks so (never mind two so soon)- oh those moonlit camel caravans in the dunes when the film goes into blue/nocturnal/female mode! I think Storaro won the BAFTA for best cinematography; well if i’m mistaken, he should have done. Debra Winger gives a very underrated performance. It’s too often unfairly criticised as shallow picturesque travelogue.
“his career can only be categorized as a disappointment.”
I couldn’t disagree more. Unlike many director’s from the same period, I think Bertolucci is still making exciting films which makes his career anything but a disappointment.
Before the Revolution, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky are some of the director’s best films, but I also think La Luna, Stealing Beauty and Beseiged had some fine moments. And last but not least, I’m personally really fond of The Dreamers and I think it’s an often unappreciated film for reasons I don’t understand.
I love her movies and don´t think his career is a disappointment. The Conformist is a master piece, but I also love Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers.
Rubia’s right on: His later work is great too: Stealing Beauty is a gem.
I’ve never really cared for Bernardo Bertolucci. I thought that The Dreamers would have been great if he had just shot footage of himself masturbating over those clips of films he included rather than running the clips he masturbated on with a pretense towards having a plot (the former act would have been daring and revolutionary. The latter act was just masturbation). I thought that The Conformist was very, very beautifully shot, ironically to a fault—I couldn’t care less about the character and sometimes I felt that the lighting and camera were so involved with each other that the movie itself lost track of the story. I think if anything needed a gritty realist look, it should have been The Conformist. Plus, that whole “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave” scene was so laughably Philosophy 101. I actually like The Last Emperor and Little Buddha as pretty period pictures, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen them. I recently saw La Commare Secca and, though it was interesting seeing a neo-realist Rashomon, I’d prefer to watch Rashomon.
I can see why people like him and I think he has his place in cinema. He just doesn’t really work for me quite so well. One man’s trash, right?
—PolarisDiB
According to reports, Bertolucci has been sidelined by serious back problems. At one point he was set to direct an adaptation of Ann Patchett’s novel “Bel Canto”, about an opera singer and her audience trapped inside a diplomat’s residence in a Latin American country after terrorists take over. He was also preparing to shoot a biopic based on the life of Gesualdo de Vanosa, a 17th century Italian musician.
I sincerely hope he can overcome his physical problems and make “BelCanto.” Opera is as important to bertolucci as it is to Visconti (though obviouslyin rahter different ways.)
He is also on a personal level an extremely nice man.
“But i can’t really explain his decline, any more than Wenders, whose pretensions may have got the better of him.”
There’s a recent interview, dating from about 2000, where Bertolucci admits he has had less interest in his more recent films as opposed to what he was doing 10, 20 years earlier. However, I think as soon as he gets over his current problems he’ll return to making great films again. In interviews taken in 2008, Bertolucci goes at length to discuss his previous work, and says that he can now look at his films objectively once again. (The films being discussed were Before the Revolution and The Conformist) It seems as though the interest is returning.
Interesting that no one is mentioning Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man! Sure, it’s not The Conformist or Last Tango, but its an excellent film none the less.
And The Sheltering Sky really is a masterpiece. Besieged is excellent as well. The Dreamers is good as well, although not on the level of those two.
Sad story. Sad. And Wenders? Even more sad.
Being something of a pathetic Bertolucci apologist, I have to violently disagree with the notion that his later films are a disappointment. Granted, the thunderbolt of creativity that was his 1969-1977 run (SPIDER’S STRATAGEM, THE CONFORMIST, LAST TANGO, and 1900) will probably never be matched, but one can say that about many artists in many genres. I think certainly Bertolucci found himself gazing inward more and more, and a bit adrift, after the Berlin Wall fell. (He’s talked about this a bit.)
And I think the later films, as frivolous as they may seem, are an attempt to come to terms with that: Certainly, STEALING BEAUTY, BESIEGED, and THE DREAMERS constitute a trilogy of isolation of sorts, in their focus on characters who close themselves off to the world and to change, usually in rambling locations. And I think THE LAST EMPEROR, THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM, and LITTLE BUDDHA, for all their gloss, were also an attempt on his part to come to terms with the fact that the ideological and aesthetic battles of his youth had played themselves out; sometime in the 80s, he had mentioned wanting to go somewhere where he didn’t know anybody and making a movie there, to get away from the culture he had known all his life.
One can argue over whether the films are any good or not (I think they’re pretty magnificent, personally) but it’d be hard to argue that they’re not still extremely personal expressions of his inner world.
The back problems, btw, I think are a result of a real bad fall when he was making LUNA. He was setting up one of his characteristic tracking shots, walking backwards, and fell off a roof, and had to direct from then on in a full body cast.
I thought The Dreamers was an unutterably terrible film, which ended by using a political uprising as the backdrop for a romance. When I saw it I thought it was the worst film I’d seen for a hell of a long time. He was there in ‘68 and should know better. I never understood Last Tango. The conformist is OK, but a bit self-consciously ’arty’. I remember when I saw La Luna thinking ‘this is where he’s lost it’.
Jackford,
Our film society screened Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man a couple of years ago. It was a terrible print, but I left impressed.
Back to Howard’s original provocation, Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about Bertolucci’s work being bound up in a struggle to resolve a tension between Freudianism and Marxism: “more specifically, a struggle to reconcile oedipal hang-ups with the precepts of Italian communism. It’s a struggle Bertolucci virtually inherited from his first mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini.” It’s an interesting reading of Bertolucci’s films, and offers a possible explanation for the “disappointment.”
One can only wonder how Last Tango in Paris would have turned out with Trintignant and Sanda, and I’m assuming it still would have featured Leaud, although Sanda and Leaud seems to be about the oddest couple in the world. That’s not to say it wasn’t a great film, but in any case I doubt it would have been such an international cause celebre had Trintignant starred.
Great News: Bertolucci is working on a new film!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1801061/
I think it’s already been filmed. No?
is this the 3D thing?
Howard Fritzson
He had an extraordinarily auspicious beginning: BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, PARTNER, THE SPIDER’S STRATEGEM. He had great influences: Pasolini, Visconti, Welles, Godard, Ophuls, among others. He achieved some beautiful films: THE CONFORMIST, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, 1900 (Worth revisiting, absolutely.). He even had a later flourish: BESIEGED). But, I think, his career can only be categorized as a disappointment. What makes things go wrong? I understand he is in ill health now but his career went off track much earlier.