Eroticism and Conflict in Bertolucci's Paris
Laurel Gildersleeve
June 09, 2009
Bernardo Bertolucci was born in Parma, Italy in 1941. His father was a successful poet and film critic who encouraged his son to follow an artistic and literary career path. Bernardo had his first poems published to literary acclaim at the age of 20. His father then introduced him to a poet friend, Pier Paolo Passolini. He worked as an assistant on Passolini´s Accetone in 1961 before going on to his own first feature The Grim Reaper (La commare secca) (1962), the product of a five-page treatment by Passolini (Ebiri 1). He would later study under Godard, exploring Marxist themes and bending the rules of cinematic grammar. Both men served as cinematic father figures to Bertolucci and their influences can be seen in the exploration of subjects of political doubt, social class, sexuality, inverted narrative structures, literary themes and a heavy use of symbolism.
In the late 1960´s Bertolucci began to undergo psychoanalysis, which directly resulted in an attraction to self-reflexive cinema with his narrative features presented as very personal statements. His films share themes of ideology and sexuality expressed in settings of class decadence or poverty and Oedipal strife.
Three such films set in Paris are The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), a story of individual entrapment during Italy´s Fascist Era, Last Tango in Paris (1972), which follows an erotic coupling in 1970´s Paris, and The Dreamers (2003), the portrait of a young bourgeois love triangle in Paris during the Vietnam Era.
The Conformist, adapted from Alberto Moravia´s novel of the same title, is an exercise in Freudian symbolism. Bertolucci conveys the unhealthy confusion that comes from blindly following a mass movement and the attempt to conform. The overriding theme of the film is entrapment. With a brilliant structure that twists the chronological events into a knot, beginning with Marcello Clerici´s (Jean-Louis Trinignant) backseat car ride to assassinate Professor Quadri.
The narrative reveals the course of events leading to the assassination in flashbacks. This is the best way to structure the story with concern to Marcello´s character. By turning Moravia´s traditionally structured novel into a complicated juxtaposition of events, where time is subject to Marcello´s confused psyche, the audience shares with him the entrapment of self, a result of being trapped in his past.
With a near homosexual rape as a child, a perceived murder, and an upbringing marked with decadence and sexual ambiguity, Marcello feels like he must find the normalcy in adulthood that was absent in childhood. He recounts his encounter and murder of Lino to a priest, telling him that the pedophile looked and felt like a woman. The confusion in sexuality drives him to violence and murder, which we later realize is a delusion. The attraction to Lino, rather than drive him to murder, drove him into a state of repression, arresting him at a pre-adolescent level and creating a complex in which he must deny himself, and create a new person, a new personality, to wage war against his true self and bury it.
When he goes to see his mother, he finds her sprawled, half nude. With hints of shame and delicacy, he pulls her dress down to cover her nudity. He is then rejected by his mad father in a de-Chirico styled asylum, which further propels his search for surrogate fathers in the characters of Italo his blind fascist best friend, Professor Quadri, and, to a lesser extent, Special Agent Manganiello (Gaston Moschin).
Bertolucci had this to say about his own search for an artistic father figure and mentor as reflected in the character of Marcello:
The Conformist is a story about me and Godard, I gave professor Quadri Godard´s phone number and address for a joke. Afterwards I said to myself, ´Well, maybe all that has some significance…I´m Marcello and I make Fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who´s a revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher.´
(Bondanella 304).
Using the lighting style of the 1930´s and 40´s films, as well as symbolic art direction, Bertolucci and Storaro create a richly textured and visually stunning prison for Marcello to move through in his search for conformity. The settings and visuals of the film can be broken down into three segments: The early events in Rome, where Marcello finds himself in very closed, tight settings. He is often behind glass, inside looking out, as in the radio station where he receives his orders. Later, with Guilia (Stefana Sandrelli), the venetian slats cover the sitting room, a traditional symbol of imprisonment. Bertolucci and Storaro take their design even further to an expressionist level as even Guilia´s dress is a zebra pattern, symbolizing their marriage as its own imprisonment.
The reverse occurs in his visit to the Fascist ministerial building, where Marcello is merely a spec in the huge, open marble spaces of the Fascist party. He is only an insignificant player in the larger ideological machine that serves to minimize and crush individualistic thought.
Arriving in Paris, the settings open up and expand. Where exteriors were absent in Rome, we see the characters in Paris moving through streets and parks. The interior shots are longer and wider. Yet, Marcello is still behind glass, a few steps back, an outsider looking in.
The third segment finds Marcello and Guilia back in Rome years after the assassination. The fall of the Fascist Party is playing out on the radio. Guilia scorns the celebration of their neighbors who before were singing the praises of The Duce. An ironic adoption of ideology that came at the moment Marcello gives his up.
This final segment is shrouded in shadow, contrasting with the well lit, tight and composed earlier shots. Earlier Marcello´s movements were sure and strong, now he moves uncertainly, hiding his face and ducking into the shadows.
As Marcello and Italo go for a night stroll in the shadows behind the coliseum, Marcello overhears Lino. His childhood comes rushing up to meet him in a realization that the turning point in his life was a self-induced fabrication. In a delusional rage Marcello renounces his friend, his beliefs, and himself. An antifascist crowd surges into the coliseum, they sweep up Italo who becomes lost in the new mob mentality as Marcello hides in the shadows against a wall.
He has pushed away what gives him individuality and side stepped the new ideology. Now he is suspended, absent, no one. With this Kantian clean slate, Marcello wanders to the cove of a male hustler. He is again framed behind bars, but now he is outside them. He has the choice to cross either side, back into his life of conformity and normalcy under a new party, or further into the cove of homosexual lust. What now is his true self? What he has created, or what he has hidden?
A debt to Freudian concepts carries over to Bertolucci´s next film Last Tango in Paris starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, and Jean-Pierre Leaud. Bertolucci calls the film ´a form of dream´ in which the entire story is an Oedipal projection on the part of the girl (who is 19) and Brando (who is 43) (Bondanella 306-07).
Last Tango is set against the visual theme of Francis Bacon paintings, which Bertolucci, Brando and Storaro visited at a Paris exhibition to assimilate the ´devastated plasticity´ into the film´s visuals (Bondanella 310).
Paul (Brando) is a new widower following his wife´s suicide, and Jeanne (Schneider) is newly engaged to Tom (Leaud). Paul and Jeanne meet in an unfurnished room for rent and fall into an animalistic copulation beneath their clothes.
In contrast to the rich, extravagant settings of The Conformist, setting the action in a vacant room rather than a larger societal backdrop suits the story´s concern with the characters. Bertolucci establishes that the focus is between them and what will come to be their relationship.
Paul sets the rules, and orders that they not reveal personal information such as names or speak of the outside world. Jeanne is happy to comply as she suffers from a mourning of her dead colonel father whom she holds in a romantic demi-god like height. Her fiancé Tom, a pretentious filmmaker eggs on her incestuous obsession. Sleeping with Paul is for Jeanne a fulfillment of sex with a dominating father figure.
The two eventually break off their meetings and Jeanne begins her new life with Tom. She and Paul meet again and drunkenly perform a famous tango. Writer Louis Gianetti calls the scene "rapturously lyrical, a pas de deux between camera and dancers – a kinetic embodiment of voluptuous release." (Gianetti and Eyman 399).
Paul follows Jeanne to her house and playfully dons her dead father´s hat. She raises her father´s pistol and kills him then practices her defense aloud, "he was going to rape me". That´s likely true. It´s also likely she wouldn´t have killed Paul had he not crossed the sacred threshold into the memory of her father.
Pauline Kael called Last Tango "the most powerfully erotic movie ever made that may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made." (Ebiri 4). David Cook calls the story one where sex, pain and death have all melded (Cook 542).
Bertolucci himself said of the film, "I didn´t make an erotic film, I made a film about eroticism." (Gianetti, Eyman 400). Through these characters Bertolucci sought to create a new sexual language. He felt that every sexual relationship, as it develops, eventually dissolves, "A relationship is condemned to lose its purity, its animal nature; sex becomes an instrument for saying other things. Things are ´erotic´ only before they develop." (400).
In 2003, Bertolucci returned to Paris, sex, politics and the bourgeoisie with another erotically charged story. The Dreamers is a film about three young film buffs moving through a sexually charged house in 1968 Paris as revolt bubbles in the streets.
Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American student meets incestuous Parisian twins Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel). The three shut themselves up in the twins´ house after their parents leave on vacation. The father is a s successful poet, perhaps a representation of Bertolucci´s own father. In the unsupervised house, they create a hermetic bourgeois getaway where, like Last Tango, the outside world melts away beneath their new world of fantasies, cinematic trivia and sex games.
During an attempted three-way suicide initiated by Isabelle after her parents discover the three lying nude together, a brick from an anti-Vietnam street riot smashes through a window. The three dash outside to find themselves in the middle of a street protest. Like Italo, they are swept up into the crowd. Matthew warns against the violence of the protest, urging the twins not to take part as Theo lights a Molotov cocktail and launches it toward a swarm of oncoming police.
Film critic Bilge Ebiri has this to say about the conclusion:
"That The Dreamers ends with its characters in the middle of a street riot is quite telling. Many of Bertolucci´s earlier works often climax with their protagonists among the masses, often in the midst of street parades and political demonstrations, as if to symbolize the change in history. Perhaps the brick flying through the window signifies a challenge from the young Bertolucci to his older self." (Ebiri 10).
Through his films, Bertolucci charged himself with breaking down barriers in sexual taboos, the merging of sex and politics onscreen, and how deeply symbolism can be used to tell a story. He did it in an arguably more tasteful and lyrical manner than his Marxist colleagues. By breaking down these taboos, he gets through the barriers set in front of each character, in front of all of us, to get inside the character and explore each inner dilemma and how far into the reaches of the psyche one can go.
By delving into the minds of his characters aided by societal backdrops, Freudian complexes and the rich Paris landscape, as well as his collaboration with Storaro, Bertolucci finds a multi-textured way of solving the character dilemma. In doing so, he raised the bar of what is acceptable and charged his audience to go deeper by confronting them with his new language.
WORKS CITED
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 4th Edition. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004.
Ebiri, Bilge. "Bernardo Bertolucci." Senses of Cinema, September 2004. Accessed online 4/30/2009. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/bertolucci.html
Eyman, Scott and Gianetti, Louis. Flashback: A Brief History of Film. 5th Edition.
New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.
ADDITIONAL SOURCE
Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. New York: Random House, 1974.
In the late 1960´s Bertolucci began to undergo psychoanalysis, which directly resulted in an attraction to self-reflexive cinema with his narrative features presented as very personal statements. His films share themes of ideology and sexuality expressed in settings of class decadence or poverty and Oedipal strife.
Three such films set in Paris are The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970), a story of individual entrapment during Italy´s Fascist Era, Last Tango in Paris (1972), which follows an erotic coupling in 1970´s Paris, and The Dreamers (2003), the portrait of a young bourgeois love triangle in Paris during the Vietnam Era.
The Conformist, adapted from Alberto Moravia´s novel of the same title, is an exercise in Freudian symbolism. Bertolucci conveys the unhealthy confusion that comes from blindly following a mass movement and the attempt to conform. The overriding theme of the film is entrapment. With a brilliant structure that twists the chronological events into a knot, beginning with Marcello Clerici´s (Jean-Louis Trinignant) backseat car ride to assassinate Professor Quadri.
The narrative reveals the course of events leading to the assassination in flashbacks. This is the best way to structure the story with concern to Marcello´s character. By turning Moravia´s traditionally structured novel into a complicated juxtaposition of events, where time is subject to Marcello´s confused psyche, the audience shares with him the entrapment of self, a result of being trapped in his past.
With a near homosexual rape as a child, a perceived murder, and an upbringing marked with decadence and sexual ambiguity, Marcello feels like he must find the normalcy in adulthood that was absent in childhood. He recounts his encounter and murder of Lino to a priest, telling him that the pedophile looked and felt like a woman. The confusion in sexuality drives him to violence and murder, which we later realize is a delusion. The attraction to Lino, rather than drive him to murder, drove him into a state of repression, arresting him at a pre-adolescent level and creating a complex in which he must deny himself, and create a new person, a new personality, to wage war against his true self and bury it.
When he goes to see his mother, he finds her sprawled, half nude. With hints of shame and delicacy, he pulls her dress down to cover her nudity. He is then rejected by his mad father in a de-Chirico styled asylum, which further propels his search for surrogate fathers in the characters of Italo his blind fascist best friend, Professor Quadri, and, to a lesser extent, Special Agent Manganiello (Gaston Moschin).
Bertolucci had this to say about his own search for an artistic father figure and mentor as reflected in the character of Marcello:
The Conformist is a story about me and Godard, I gave professor Quadri Godard´s phone number and address for a joke. Afterwards I said to myself, ´Well, maybe all that has some significance…I´m Marcello and I make Fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who´s a revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher.´
(Bondanella 304).
Using the lighting style of the 1930´s and 40´s films, as well as symbolic art direction, Bertolucci and Storaro create a richly textured and visually stunning prison for Marcello to move through in his search for conformity. The settings and visuals of the film can be broken down into three segments: The early events in Rome, where Marcello finds himself in very closed, tight settings. He is often behind glass, inside looking out, as in the radio station where he receives his orders. Later, with Guilia (Stefana Sandrelli), the venetian slats cover the sitting room, a traditional symbol of imprisonment. Bertolucci and Storaro take their design even further to an expressionist level as even Guilia´s dress is a zebra pattern, symbolizing their marriage as its own imprisonment.
The reverse occurs in his visit to the Fascist ministerial building, where Marcello is merely a spec in the huge, open marble spaces of the Fascist party. He is only an insignificant player in the larger ideological machine that serves to minimize and crush individualistic thought.
Arriving in Paris, the settings open up and expand. Where exteriors were absent in Rome, we see the characters in Paris moving through streets and parks. The interior shots are longer and wider. Yet, Marcello is still behind glass, a few steps back, an outsider looking in.
The third segment finds Marcello and Guilia back in Rome years after the assassination. The fall of the Fascist Party is playing out on the radio. Guilia scorns the celebration of their neighbors who before were singing the praises of The Duce. An ironic adoption of ideology that came at the moment Marcello gives his up.
This final segment is shrouded in shadow, contrasting with the well lit, tight and composed earlier shots. Earlier Marcello´s movements were sure and strong, now he moves uncertainly, hiding his face and ducking into the shadows.
As Marcello and Italo go for a night stroll in the shadows behind the coliseum, Marcello overhears Lino. His childhood comes rushing up to meet him in a realization that the turning point in his life was a self-induced fabrication. In a delusional rage Marcello renounces his friend, his beliefs, and himself. An antifascist crowd surges into the coliseum, they sweep up Italo who becomes lost in the new mob mentality as Marcello hides in the shadows against a wall.
He has pushed away what gives him individuality and side stepped the new ideology. Now he is suspended, absent, no one. With this Kantian clean slate, Marcello wanders to the cove of a male hustler. He is again framed behind bars, but now he is outside them. He has the choice to cross either side, back into his life of conformity and normalcy under a new party, or further into the cove of homosexual lust. What now is his true self? What he has created, or what he has hidden?
A debt to Freudian concepts carries over to Bertolucci´s next film Last Tango in Paris starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, and Jean-Pierre Leaud. Bertolucci calls the film ´a form of dream´ in which the entire story is an Oedipal projection on the part of the girl (who is 19) and Brando (who is 43) (Bondanella 306-07).
Last Tango is set against the visual theme of Francis Bacon paintings, which Bertolucci, Brando and Storaro visited at a Paris exhibition to assimilate the ´devastated plasticity´ into the film´s visuals (Bondanella 310).
Paul (Brando) is a new widower following his wife´s suicide, and Jeanne (Schneider) is newly engaged to Tom (Leaud). Paul and Jeanne meet in an unfurnished room for rent and fall into an animalistic copulation beneath their clothes.
In contrast to the rich, extravagant settings of The Conformist, setting the action in a vacant room rather than a larger societal backdrop suits the story´s concern with the characters. Bertolucci establishes that the focus is between them and what will come to be their relationship.
Paul sets the rules, and orders that they not reveal personal information such as names or speak of the outside world. Jeanne is happy to comply as she suffers from a mourning of her dead colonel father whom she holds in a romantic demi-god like height. Her fiancé Tom, a pretentious filmmaker eggs on her incestuous obsession. Sleeping with Paul is for Jeanne a fulfillment of sex with a dominating father figure.
The two eventually break off their meetings and Jeanne begins her new life with Tom. She and Paul meet again and drunkenly perform a famous tango. Writer Louis Gianetti calls the scene "rapturously lyrical, a pas de deux between camera and dancers – a kinetic embodiment of voluptuous release." (Gianetti and Eyman 399).
Paul follows Jeanne to her house and playfully dons her dead father´s hat. She raises her father´s pistol and kills him then practices her defense aloud, "he was going to rape me". That´s likely true. It´s also likely she wouldn´t have killed Paul had he not crossed the sacred threshold into the memory of her father.
Pauline Kael called Last Tango "the most powerfully erotic movie ever made that may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made." (Ebiri 4). David Cook calls the story one where sex, pain and death have all melded (Cook 542).
Bertolucci himself said of the film, "I didn´t make an erotic film, I made a film about eroticism." (Gianetti, Eyman 400). Through these characters Bertolucci sought to create a new sexual language. He felt that every sexual relationship, as it develops, eventually dissolves, "A relationship is condemned to lose its purity, its animal nature; sex becomes an instrument for saying other things. Things are ´erotic´ only before they develop." (400).
In 2003, Bertolucci returned to Paris, sex, politics and the bourgeoisie with another erotically charged story. The Dreamers is a film about three young film buffs moving through a sexually charged house in 1968 Paris as revolt bubbles in the streets.
Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American student meets incestuous Parisian twins Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel). The three shut themselves up in the twins´ house after their parents leave on vacation. The father is a s successful poet, perhaps a representation of Bertolucci´s own father. In the unsupervised house, they create a hermetic bourgeois getaway where, like Last Tango, the outside world melts away beneath their new world of fantasies, cinematic trivia and sex games.
During an attempted three-way suicide initiated by Isabelle after her parents discover the three lying nude together, a brick from an anti-Vietnam street riot smashes through a window. The three dash outside to find themselves in the middle of a street protest. Like Italo, they are swept up into the crowd. Matthew warns against the violence of the protest, urging the twins not to take part as Theo lights a Molotov cocktail and launches it toward a swarm of oncoming police.
Film critic Bilge Ebiri has this to say about the conclusion:
"That The Dreamers ends with its characters in the middle of a street riot is quite telling. Many of Bertolucci´s earlier works often climax with their protagonists among the masses, often in the midst of street parades and political demonstrations, as if to symbolize the change in history. Perhaps the brick flying through the window signifies a challenge from the young Bertolucci to his older self." (Ebiri 10).
Through his films, Bertolucci charged himself with breaking down barriers in sexual taboos, the merging of sex and politics onscreen, and how deeply symbolism can be used to tell a story. He did it in an arguably more tasteful and lyrical manner than his Marxist colleagues. By breaking down these taboos, he gets through the barriers set in front of each character, in front of all of us, to get inside the character and explore each inner dilemma and how far into the reaches of the psyche one can go.
By delving into the minds of his characters aided by societal backdrops, Freudian complexes and the rich Paris landscape, as well as his collaboration with Storaro, Bertolucci finds a multi-textured way of solving the character dilemma. In doing so, he raised the bar of what is acceptable and charged his audience to go deeper by confronting them with his new language.
WORKS CITED
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 4th Edition. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004.
Ebiri, Bilge. "Bernardo Bertolucci." Senses of Cinema, September 2004. Accessed online 4/30/2009. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/bertolucci.html
Eyman, Scott and Gianetti, Louis. Flashback: A Brief History of Film. 5th Edition.
New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.
ADDITIONAL SOURCE
Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. New York: Random House, 1974.
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