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"Nuovi sogni" in Parma, Stendhal 1964. The young aristocrat (Francesco Barilli) is torn between radical commitment and bourgeois comfort, a privileged anxiety, not even a screening of Red River can keep the best friend (Allen Midgette) from drowning himself. With the mentor (Morando Morandini) he feels like a pigeon on Garibaldi's statue, with the aunt from Milan (Adriana Asti) he feels the rapture and anguish of sensuality. "The only remedy to my pain is other people." A dilettante's education, a welter of contradictory ideas and images given sweep and heat by the precociously brilliant Bernardo Bertolucci. The protagonist is alternately pensive and larky, "a nostalgia for the present" is his malady. The aunt favors stillness, is upset by a little girl's song and haloed by a flickering television screen, their incestuous fling is a momentary detour on the road to conformity (cf. Luna). Tracking shots and jump cuts, sometimes at the same time, a splash of Minnellian color courtesy of a camera obscura. Afternoon at the movies, Godardspeak in the pool hall ("I remember a 360° pan in a Nicholas Ray film... one of the most moral moments in film history"). The holiday of ideology, verbose theorems into waves of emotions. A metaphysical anecdote ("older than Proust"), a shimmering elegy for the Po River. Bertolucci's dilemmas amid palatial chambers and parade banners, the droll comedy of the boy who learns he's not the Marxist rebel he thinks he is, "important for politics, and poetry." A Wellesian disenchantment to go with the Wellesian virtuosity, Visconti in general and Senso in particular for Verdi's Macbeth at the opera house. "A problem of content, not a problem of style." The conclusion revises Clayton's Room at the Top. Cinematography by Aldo Scavarda. With Cristina Pariset, Cecrope Barilli, and Gianni Amico. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |