Novecento

Zola-Marx-Freud slurry, Giant treatment. "The gentry have a special place to masturbate" Romanticism dies with Verdi, the new century belongs to scion and bastard born on the same day at opposite poles of the Italian caste system. Vintage Hollywood brawlers embody contrasting patriarchs: Burt Lancaster as the landowner lamenting the tragedy of not being able to molest a little peasant girl, Sterling Hayden as the head serf expiring just in time to witness revolutionary stirrings. "Can this be what they call socialism?" The end of the feudal order is a golden childhood, Mussolini's rise is a muddy winter, in between is a time for boys to grow up. Pampered padrone (Robert De Niro) and principled plebeian (Gérard Depardieu), as close as Joyce's Shem and Shaun. One gets a playgirl (Dominique Sanda) and the other a schoolteacher (Stefania Sandrelli) but to the end remain each other's destined mates, able to fuck only with an epileptic prostitute sandwiched between them. "Milk and shit," loads of it in Bernardo Bertolucci's dialectical panorama of political poses and carnal urges, a darkening sprawl of crimson ribbons and black shirts. "My lost countryside" is a canvas painted in honey, ocarinas in the woods and all. Fascism gets funded during a church meeting, the vile foreman (Donald Sutherland) passes the collection plate around. (Laura Betti as his Lady Macbeth joins him in murderous-pederastic jaunts, "an elephant couldn't make you cum.") Beauty and its defilement, Art Deco palaces and storms of manure, cocaine hijinks and barnyard slaughter, a continuously moving camera throughout. Everything Bertolucci knows is here, down to Francesca Bertini as a memento of archaic gentility among escalating modernist horrors. "Cruel hands of destiny," the agrarian utopia dissipates before it starts, the bourgeois-activist schism remains pointedly unsettled for nation and filmmaker alike. Clampett's The Old Grey Hare for the coda, Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs for the rebuke. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Alida Valli, Werner Bruhns, Romolo Valli, Stefania Casini, Anna Henkel, Ellen Schwiers, Maria Monti, Giacomo Rizzo, and Allen Midgette.