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The image blurs luminous moon and maternal visage, a child's vision at dusk. (It's prepared by the solar silhouette of parents twisting all'italiana on a seaside terrazzo, an overture of pure cinema that finds the toddler choking on honey and tangled in umbilical twine.) The Mediterranean ur-szene yields to a Brooklyn of steel and glass, the boy is now an adolescent moper (Matthew Barry), Mom (Jill Clayburgh) is a soprano married to her manager (Fred Gwynne), who departs early. Hers is a realm of "singing and dreaming and creating," the shift to Rome has sonny scoring heroin from an affable dealer and heavy-petting with a frizzy ragazza in a movie theater under the gaze of a dubbed Marilyn Monroe. Such are the free-floating elements of Bernardo Bertolucci's therapeutic fever, perplexing, absurd, tenderly comic, utterly exhilarating, a feast of raw nerves behind succulent surfaces. The young artist "come una bomba," trembling for a fix until Mom intervenes in a remembrance of Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy. Opera as theme and style, starry sky and painted constellation bewitch the juvenile equally, he wanders behind the scenes for the spectacle's filters and pulleys. "A lost person" is one indifferent to Villa Verdi, brat and diva on a tour of the locations of Before the Revolution and 1900. (Along the way there's Franco Citti cruising at the ice-cream parlor, Renato Salvatori with an anecdote about fishing with Castro, and curtains that part for a Roberto Benigni jump-scare.) "Man, you really screwed me up." The search for wholeness leads to an open-air rehearsal of Un Ballo in Maschera with the lost father (Tomás Milián) resembling Bertolucci himself. "Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed," says Dorothy Parker, "we'll always be Jung together." The following year offers Ordinary People as the tasteful version, if anyone wants a tasteful version. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Veronica Lazar, Alida Valli, Elisabetta Campeti, Carlo Verdone, Peter Eyre, and Mustapha Barat.
--- Fernando F. Croce |