Novecento
Bernardo Bertolucci (1976)
According to Wikipedia:
‘The original director’s cut of the film runs 311 minutes. Alberto Grimaldi, the film’s producer, was contractually obligated to deliver a 195-minute version to Paramount Pictures. Bertolucci originally wanted to release the film in two parts, but Grimaldi refused. Grimaldi then locked Bertolucci out of the editing room, and assembled a 180-minute cut. Bertolucci, horrified at Grimaldi’s cut, decided to compromise. … His 255-minute version was the one initially released in the United States.’
The BFI showed the 311-minute version: as if to remind us of the film’s troubled history and that watching it would be a test of endurance, a fire alarm went off just as 1900 was due to start in NFT1. Given the BFI’s usual administrative standards, I feared the worst – especially when the pleasant girl who was checking tickets on the door came tentatively into the auditorium and said quietly that the building had to be evacuated. (Fire alarm: pass it on …) But the front of house manager (the good one, Dominic) did a great job – reassuringly authoritative outside with the megaphone, graciously apologetic when he welcomed us back to our seats. (Even more surprising was that I managed to tell him well done when I saw him a week or two later.) The screening, due to start at 3.20pm, got underway forty minutes later: there was one 45-minute interval and the credits rolled a few minutes before ten o’clock. There may have been an element of self-congratulation in the applause at the end but surely there was gratitude too. 1900 is a curate’s egg but also a banquet.
On one level, the film – from a screenplay by Bertolucci, his brother Giuseppe and Franco Arcalli (also the editor) – is simply schematic, and set up as a prince-and-pauper morality tale. On another level, 1900 dramatises the political history of Italy throughout the first half of the twentieth century – or nearly the first half: it closes at the end of the war in Europe in 1945. On 27 January 1901 in Emilia Romagna – the day of the death of Verdi, the region’s most famous son (at least until Bertolucci) – two baby boys are born. Olmo, the illegitimate child of a peasant, arrives a few hours before Alfredo, scion of the landowning Berlinghieri family: throughout their lives Olmo always seems to stay a step ahead of Alfredo, especially in the latter’s eyes. The two boys’ fathers don’t impose themselves on the action anywhere nearly as strongly as their grandfathers: is Bertolucci saying that this intervening generation was historically minor compared with the one that preceded it and those who became adults as Mussolini came to power? The first main section of 1900 describes the childhood relationship of Olmo and Alfredo. The next part of the film takes their story forward from the end of World War I (from which Olmo is a returning soldier). The events of the day of the German surrender in May 1945 form a prologue and Bertolucci returns to and extends them in the last chapter of 1900.
The political set pieces – there are plenty of marches – are essentially boring, not because they’re not well staged but because they’re designed to make only political points. Bertolucci is such an instinctive film artist that the people in the crowd scenes are a collection of extraordinary faces and physiques: nevertheless, his main interest is in presenting their collective significance. (One sequence, where all the marchers are wearing a red scarf or other accessory of that colour, is bizarre: as PK says, it’s ‘Communist-color-coordinated’; and the redness suggests nearly literal blood brotherhood.) But many passages in 1900 are wonderfully realised. Bertolucci’s images are never static – they are never merely photography but always (Vittorio Storaro’s) cinematography. The sequences in the Emilia Romagna countryside have the texture and movement of memory. As usual, if I say these moving pictures suggest pieces of art history I can’t back that up with examples – but the unforced authority of the compositions is a marvel. (I can’t analyse them.) This is true right from the opening credits: we see a single man’s face in a sepia photograph and the camera pulls back to reveal an expanding (we assume a family) group of faces. We peer, fascinated, at these faces and their penetrating looks make us feel they’re holding us in their gaze too.
When a performer sees his role as primarily a political comment, the effect is deadly: Donald Sutherland as Attila Mellanchini, hired by Alfredo’s father as the foreman on the Berlinghieri estate and a sadistic blackshirt, is by some way the worst offender, although Romolo Valli as Attila’s employer runs him a good second. But – just as he peoples the crowd scenes with vivid camera subjects – Bertolucci largely casts first rate people and get matching performances from them. What a great actor Robert De Niro was in nearly everything he did during the 1970s: he gives layers and complexity to Alfredo’s inadequacy: the young man becomes socially (and sexually) accomplished but never quite loses his air of self-reproach. Gérard Depardieu is Olmo, physically fearless except in a sequence, extraordinary in its frankness, when he and Alfredo visit a prostitute (Stefania Casini), who has an epileptic fit at a bad moment. Although he was a lot lighter in the mid-seventies than he is now, Depardieu is cut out (hewn: ‘olmo’ is Italian for elm) to be a symbolic figure in a way that De Niro isn’t.
Yet it’s De Niro’s acting that absorbs me more. In a scene such as the one in which Alfredo, with his wife-to-be Ada (Dominique Sanda) and his uncle Ottavio (Werner Bruhns), tries cocaine for the first time, De Niro shows a dazzling combination of almost acrobatic physical skills and subtle touches that enrich his characterisation – he judges perfectly Alfredo’s over-eagerness as he takes the drug. (It’s a pity, though not any kind of blemish on his performance as a whole, that this scene is interrupted by the news that Alfredo’s father is mortally ill and Bertolucci has De Niro do a desperate run on his return to the family home that’s falsely dynamic.) Both adult actors are greatly helped by the two boys who play Olmo and Alfredo on the verge of adolescence. Roberto Maccanti (Olmo) suggests a game-for-anything, humorous purposefulness on which Depardieu builds. Paolo Pavesi (Alfredo) conveys a sense of wanting to depart from the role dictated by his lineage; De Niro complicates this quality brilliantly. There’s a rich ambiguity to the recurring physical closeness of the two boys and their adult counterparts, whether they’re fighting or embracing. This culminates in a final flash forward to their old age and an almost comical sequence which sees them still at odds and still inextricably linked (the comedy takes the edge off the political symbolism of the dual very effectively).
As the two protagonists’ grandfathers, Sterling Hayden and Burt Lancaster give broader but compelling portraits of, respectively, the worker and the landowner. (The deaths of both these patriarchs are superbly done.) Stefania Sandrelli is pleasantly natural as Olmo’s wife Anita, as loyal to the Communist cause as she is to her husband (she dies giving birth to their only child). I was less sure about Dominique Sanda as Ada. As a physical presence, she’s immensely striking but you sometimes feel that it’s the actress as much as the character who’s a poseuse and it’s all too believable when Ada eventually goes barmy. Laura Betti as Attila’s wife Regina is also his partner in malignity, although she’s rather more nuanced than Sutherland. She doesn’t age that much in the course of the story but then she doesn’t need to. Regina is furious that she doesn’t marry Alfredo; matronly plump from the start, she always looks old enough to be his mother. (De Niro’s aging make-up is very good and he’s highly convincing in his incarnation of a man eventually well beyond his own thirty-two years). Among the smaller parts, Paulo Branco is particularly strong as the land worker who, in protest at his family’s treatment, cuts off his ear.
Although you get used to it eventually, the dubbed-Italian voices, because you know they don’t belong to De Niro et al, are a distraction. There are times when Bertolucci seems to want to omit nothing; this results in a loss of rhythm in, for example, the recreation of social rituals among the peasants in the first part of the film. You appreciate that he’s aiming for novelistic detail – perhaps trying too to emulate the great opening sequences in The Godfather and The Godfather, part II – but the equivalent passages in 1900 aren’t nearly so dramatic as Coppola’s movement between the foreground and background to Connie Corleone’s wedding in the first film and Anthony Corleone’s confirmation party in the second. (The rhythmical problems of 1900 are also no doubt a consequence of Bertolucci’s shooting more than he knew what to do with – and couldn’t bear to part with.) At one stage – when Attila and Regina are holding the property owners virtual prisoners in their own house – the metaphorical level of the narrative seems to dominate, excessively and constrictingly. (I wondered if the surname Berlinghieri was meant to suggest (Enrico) Berlinguer, the leader of the Italian Communist Party at the time 1900 was made, but, if so, I’m not sure what connection was intended.)
Bertolucci gets across the point that the workers weren’t the only underdogs in the first quarter of the century – that so were plenty of the people who became supporters of Mussolini. It’s disappointing, though, that, not for the first time on screen, the fascists are presented as sexually inadequate and perverted. The scene in which Attila and Regina sodomise then kill a young boy is horrifyingly powerful – but it seems a cheat nevertheless. Bertolucci is trying to convince us that fascism is politically evil by showing the personal psychopathology of adherents to the fascist cause. (Attila also does something terrible to a cat and I wasn’t convinced the film-makers weren’t doing something nearly as bad.) Attila and Regina get their just desserts in 1945 but the effect is less interestingly ambiguous than it first promises to be. When the working people begin to take their revenge on this rebarbative pair you get a sense that it’s because there’s no hero for them to applaud and that they go for Attila and Regina, as the villains of the piece, faute de mieux – but then Olmo, the hero, does return and it doesn’t make any difference to the crowd’s violent reprisals against the Mellanchinis. Ennio Morricone’s music is lovely in the childhood sequences; the harshness and urgency it acquires in the later stages come less easily to this composer.
Another sequence which especially impressed me was the one in which Olmo, Alfredo, Anita and Ada are out dancing, and in the course of which they change partners. There are lots of wonderful details – a Punch and Judy show, frogs hung around the boy Olmo’s hat when he and Alfredo and their little girl companion are playing by the river (the detail rhymed with a grand dinner where Alfredo retches eating frogs’ legs). The bold child Olmo lies on a railway line as a train passes over him and dares timorous Alfredo to do the same; there are two variations on this moment later in the film and Bertolucci places them to great effect. Sometimes the enormous length of the film pays rich dividends in the reprise of cognate images – of pigs and trees, for example. 1900 seems to be at the point of ending many times during its last half hour (and not just because you’ve had enough by then). The protracted climactic episode in the town square, in which Olmo tells the assembled crowd ‘the master is dead but Alfredo Berlinghieri is alive’, comes over as agitprop theatre – you feel that Olmo is suppressing his personal feelings about Alfredo simply in order to play this scene out. Yet perhaps the single most memorable image in the whole picture is supplied by the crowd’s departure from the square – bearing a huge red canopy, which recedes into the distance like an insistently sinuous scarlet river.
16 April 2011
