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Fascismo as the weakling's refuge is the simple theme behind the obfuscating Viscontisms, a vision suffused with perfume and poison. Il dottore is a civil servant (Jean-Louis Trintignant) introduced like a Melville gangster, his need for the "impression of normalcy" is explained to a sightless ideologue during a radio recording session. (Glimpsed through a glass pane, the immaculate Art Deco studio ca. 1938 turns up in Lynch's Mulholland Drive.) The past holds a fateful encounter with the Uranist chauffeur (Pierre Clémenti), the present promises marriage to a petit bourgeois nitwit (Stefania Sandrelli) and all the mediocrity that entails, an alternate future might include escape with his old mentor's bisexual wife (Dominique Sanda). The ideal of political engagement and carnal mobility, psychological analysis and the haunted subconscious, "shadows, the reflections of things." Bernardo Bertolucci lays it all out as a fragmented car ride through acres of luscious style. Italy is the moldy mansion housing the morphine-strung mother and the marble asylum where the father lounges in straitjackets, the trip to Paris is a succession of process shots set like train windows, flickers from Sternberg. Osborne's A Patriot for Me and Magritte compositions (a split-screen effect is achieved by arranging characters in separate rooms within the frame), Plato's cave as a metaphor savored by the hunchback subversive (Enzo Tarascio). Visual splendor reigns supreme in Bertolucci's staggering historical dreamscape, a slinky camera in continuous activity: Gliding from snow and metallic blues to fallen leaves and burnished yellows, the mise en scène reaches an apex with a teasing tango and then dissolves in the handheld terror of a roadside assassination. "Debout, les damnés de la terre..." The 1943 stretto unfolds in a dictatorship's ruins, gazing back over the shoulder and into repressed truth. A masterly erudition, velvety yet unsettled, proudly taken up by Coppola and Scorsese and Fassbinder. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Gastone Moschin, Fosco Giachetti, José Quaglio, and Yvonne Sanson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |