The Last Emperor

Film: The Last Emperor
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

One of the things I love about historical dramas is that I frequently learn about something I’d have otherwise never known. The Last Emperor is a case in point. I know a very tiny bit of Chinese history, mostly connected to World War II. Even so, I knew very little of the history of the Chinese monarchy before seeing this (and I remembered very little before this rewatch). The problem with historical dramas is that any deviation from actual history becomes canon.

Pu Yi (played as a toddler by Richard Vuu, as a child by Tsou Tijger, and as an adult by John Lone) is named as the Emperor of China at the tender age of three. He is moved into the Forbidden City and is forever unable to leave it. While is power is complete and supreme, he is a prisoner of his own position. Additionally, unknown to him because such things are kept from him, China has become a republic, and the position of emperor is nothing more than an elaborate figurehead.

Web of Deceit

Film: La Strategia del Ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem)
Format: VHS from Augustana College Tredway Library through WorldCat on big ol’ television.

I have a strange history with my genealogy. I don’t have a great deal invested in my family’s past, but a few other people do. Several years ago, my aunt gave me boxes of genealogical material from my mother’s side of the family. I’m still not 100% sure why she gave it to me. Years before that, a distant relative started sending out a newsletter to everyone with the same last name containing tidbits of our ancestral past back to about 1640. So I know something of my family’s history through no effort of my own.

That’s relevant here, because La Strategia del Ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem) is a film about family history and more specifically about the skeletons that lurk in our ancestral closets. What starts out as a simple request becomes a long and tortuous path into hidden meanings, shady dealings, betrayal, and murder. Almost in spite of itself, La Strategia del Ragno becomes a film noir or an homage to same.

What is it with Bertolucci?

Film: Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution)
Format: Internet video on laptop

Considering the parade of films I have watched in the past two years, it takes quite a bit more than it used to to really squick me, but Bertolucci’s Prima Della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution) managed to in its first half hour or so. The reason will become evident as I get into the actual narrative here. What’s interesting is that the main reason for this, while central to the plot, could have easily been changed to be far less creepy and still have almost the exact same purpose in service to the narrative.

Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is in many ways the classic example of youth in revolt. Blessed with a bourgeoisie upbringing, he is filled with passion and energy, and the teachings of his professor, Cesare (Morando Morandini), a communist. At home, Fabrizio spends time with his friend Agostino (Allen Midgette), who shocks Fabrizio with his sudden death. Agostino drowns, and there are some indications that it may be a suicide. Conflicted and filled with an energy that has no focus or direction, Fabrizio falls into the arms of Gina (Adriana Asti) and begins a passionate affair.

And here’s where the squicking comes in—Gina is Fabrizio’s aunt. She’s about 10 years older than he is and plenty attractive, and in many ways it would be natural for him to be attracted to her. In this case, though, the attraction is mutual, and they begin mashing on each other at Agostino’s funeral and continue for quite a bit of the rest of the film. I’m not a prude and I try not to keep my views provincial, but every time these two ended up in a clinch, I found myself wanting to look away.

This is not the first time that I have encountered creepy sex in a Bertolucci film. I am instantly reminded of the butter and pig vomit scenes in Last Tango in Paris as well as the sex with the epileptic prostitute and the pederasty sequence in Novocento. Of all of these, I can see the point of some of what happened in Novocento, but I’m forced into the belief that Bertolucci might have been something of a pervert. In the case of this film, the function that Gina serves is as more or less an outlet for Fabrizio’s undirected, general frustration. I don’t, honestly, see any real difference that would have been made by having Gina be a friend of the family, akin to something more like The Graduate.

The real point of the film comes in the third act when Fabrizio, Cesare, and Gina go to visit Gina’s friend Puck (Cecrope Barilli). Puck lives on a parcel of undeveloped land that he is about to lose, unable to maintain his hold on it into the future. That, more than anything, is what Fabrizio is dealing with. He cannot, and will not live in Italy’s fascist past, and it appears that the future is both bleak and completely unknown. For him, neither past nor future hold anything worth saving or working toward. There is only now, and now is also insufficient in fulfilling him.

Prima Della Rivoluzione was filmed in black-and-white, which is evocative of several different possibilities. One possibility is that Fabrizio, still young, sees his world in these same black-and-white tones. Another is that the world for many of our characters truly does exist in this colorless world. There’s really no reason to choose between these two possibilities, of course. Bertolucci may have meant both, or neither, or something else entirely. It’s noteworthy, though, that the one small piece of the film that is in color is essentially a short pseudo-fantasy that Fabrizio arranges for Gina’s benefit. Here, and only here, something completely outside the normal world, do colors exist for us.

With a film like this, I am unable to prevent myself from projecting the characters forward, beyond the scope of the film itself. In this film, my thinking concerns family gatherings in the future and just how awkward some of those meetings well be. “Hey, Aunt Gina, remember that time a couple of years ago when you and I had all of that incestuous sex?” In fact, near the end of the film, Gina leaves and Fabrizio goes back to Clelia (Cristina Pariset), his fiancé introduced very briefly at the beginning of the film. And while he accepts this, it is soon evident that his mind is still on Gina.

It’s evident throughout the film that Bertolucci spent a lot of time watching Godard, as this film is very similar in style to Breathless. We see similar jump cuts, similar camera movements. In fact the two films look very much like the could have come from the same director. This isn’t too surprising, considering Bertolucci’s age of 22 at the time of filming this. Like the work of many a young filmmaker, this comes across in many ways as a combination of homage, tribute, and outright theft of a favored mentor. This isn’t a criticism, but a statement of fact.

But really, Gina’s identity, her eventual betrayal, and the destruction of their relationship could have had 95% of the same effect had she simply been the girl across the street, although it does make for a fascinating reaction from Gina at Fabrizio’s wedding.

Why to watch Prima Della Rivoluzione: It’s a natural, Italian counterpoint to the French New Wave.
Why not to watch: Because for Bertolucci, good sex is disturbing sex.

Just an Ordinary Average Guy

Film: Il Conformista (The Conformist)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

We expect certain thing from spy movies in general. The standard spy movie follows a path like Three Days of the Condor or the Jason Bourne films. In these, a spy gets put into a strange or terrible or bad situation and needs to fight his way out of it. We root for the spy in these cases. James Bond is probably the most classic example of good guy spy. Even when Bond is a bastard, we still kind of like him and expect him to come out on top. The other end of the spy thriller holds stories like The Eye of the Needle, where the spy is the bad guy and needs to be stopped by the film’s heroes.

So it’s a touch ironic that a film called Il Conformista (The Conformist) doesn’t conform to either of these two possibilities. The spy, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is our main character, but he’s almost impossible to root for. The first part of this is that he’s really not a spy, but a government-paid assassin. That isn’t enough to stop most people from still rooting for him though. What does is that the government he works for is Mussolini’s fascist government in the 1930s.

Our character is interesting in a way, though. The film has this name, and is named after him, because he wants nothing more than to fit in wherever he is. We take up the story as he is planning to get married to the very sexy and evidently sex-starved Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). We learn a lot of his past when he is essentially forced to go to confession before the wedding, since the priest will not marry the pair until both have confessed.

What we learn is that he was excluded from other children as a child, and thus was often badly abused by his schoolmates. He was also evidently abused sexually by his family’s chauffer. It’s also worth noting that at this point, the chauffer has a pistol that Marcello takes and shoots randomly. He manages to shoot the chauffer at this point, too, and this murder is one of the things that he confesses to.

Marcello’s government contact, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) tells Marcello that he is to head to Paris and contact a man named Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). Quadri is a retired professor who left Italy because he was staunchly anti-fascist, which in the parlance of the time means he is a communist. To make everything work, Marcello marries Giulia and takes her to Paris on their honeymoon. And it’s there that Manganiello tells Marcello that Quadri needs to be eliminated. This is complicated by the fact that Marcello, despite his recent marriage, wants to get humpy with Anna (Dominique Sanda), the professor’s sexy wife who may have been a prostitute and may have a history with him. Oh, and it turns out that Quadri was once one of Marcello’s professors.

This is an odd movie, and it struck me oddly. I just watched the film and have almost no memory of it and almost no opinion on it. It is pretty stylish and nice to look at, but this desire of Marcello to simply fit in, to create the perfect life for himself, isn’t nearly explored enough. It’s brought up a number of times, but it didn’t really go anywhere for me. Certainly the ending gets to the same place and shows us exactly how far Marcello will go to fit in, but there’s not enough of why he is the way he is.

I don’t really know. I’m continuing to write on this, but I don’t have anything much more to say. Ultimately, that’s how I felt about Il Conformista; it keeps going, but doesn’t say much.

Why to watch Il Conformista: A spy thriller with a very odd resolution.
Why not to watch: It’s sort of hard to care.

History is Not for the Timid

Film: Novocento (1900)
Format: DVDs from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s a reason I’ve gotten through most of the really long films in the first half of this quest. It’s mainly because really long films can be really hard to watch. Oh, there’s still plenty of films that clock in at close the three- and four-hour marks, but to my knowledge, Bertolucci’s Novocento (1900) is the last one on The List that runs more than five. It took me several days to get through the whole thing.

I also find that the longer the film, the shorter my synopsis. So here’s the quickie version of this film. Two boys are born on the same day at the same place in Italy. One, Alfredo Berlinghieri (played as a child by Paolo Pavesi and as an adult by Robert De Niro), is born to the ruling family of the estate. The other, Olmo Dalco (played first by Roberto Maccanti, then by Gerard Depardieu), is born to the family of peasants who work the land. The two grow up together and sometime rivals and sometime friends, but are separated several times. While Alfredo’s life is money and pleasure, Olmo’s life is work and socialism. We also get World War I, the rise of fascism, and the subsequent socialist revolution after the war. And this takes something more than 300 minutes to tell.

And that’s really all there is to this. It is a warts-and-all telling though, and for Bertolucci, this means mostly warts. The life of the Berlinghieri family is essentially the sorts of problems of the wealthy we have come to associate with the movies. Alfredo has a loveless marriage and deals with the rise of fascism by essentially ignoring it completely. Olmo, on the other hand, deals with intense poverty, oppression by the fascists, and the fact that the love of his life dies in childbirth. Meanwhile, the peasants on the Berlinghieri farm are forced to deal with Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland), and abusive and terrible foreman who converts early to fascism and is cruel beyond measure.

It seems that over and over what this film is about is simple human brutality. Much of this comes from the character of Attila—he bludgeons a cat to death near the middle of the film to prove a point about dealing with communists, kills a child brutally, and murders a former landowner. But the brutality and vicious sexual practices aren’t limited to him, nor strictly to the fascists. In one fairly memorable scene, Olmo and Alfredo prepare to share a prostitute, but Alfredo insists that she drink first. This triggers the woman’s epilepsy, so we get a full-blown seizure during naked time. There’s a ton of nudity in the film as well, and virtually all of it is about as unerotic as possible, to the point where it is frankly unappealing.

What I don’t understand is the length of these endless epic films. I understand the point that Bertolucci is trying to make here, but it seems very much like he could have made this point without a number of these scenes. Is it important, for instance, that we see the young Olmo and Alfredo comparing their penises? Do we need the full length of the party scene in which Alfredo’s eventual wife pretends to be blind and then proceeds to tell everyone there that she really isn’t blind? I understand that a story of this scope requires a bit of length, but a good hour or more could be sliced out of this film without much loss in terms of character or story. A lot of what happens is merely Bertolucci piling up additional evidence for things that we as an audience already understand.

It’s an interesting choice to completely skip the wars, though, and that’s a choice I appreciated. Olmo goes off to war and returns home, and this takes just a few minutes of screen time. We don’t get an endless slog of battles and fight sequences and men running out of trenches and being gunned down. Similarly, we don’t see anything of World War II. Essentially, the story that is being told here is limited to the Berlinghieri estate and what happens there rather than in Italy as a whole.

It is an interesting story, and one worth some time. But it is in many ways less an actual story and more an investigation of these two men who grew up side-by-side but also miles apart from each other. But really, this is all there is here. It’s the story of two very different lives lived at the same place and in the same timeframe against an increasingly dangerous and inhospitable backdrop. And for that, Bertolucci could have saved us all a little time and cut this down to a manageable size.

There are shorter versions of this film available, incidentally. I can’t speak to the quality or what has been cut, but I imagine that some of the more brutal sequences are not in the final version of the film, in part because this brutality is the difference between the unrated version and one more palatable to most people.

I can’t say I disliked Novocento, but I can say that I was ready for it to be done around the conclusion of the first disc, and more than ready when there was still an hour left to go.

Why to watch Novocento: A 40-year portrait of Italy through two wars.
Why not to watch: Sometimes, that 40 years feels like real time.

I Don't Dance

Film: Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Certain films resonate with people. For instance, say “The Exorcist” to people talking about movies, and you’re guaranteed to get some sort of reaction. Ultimo Tango a Parigi, far better known as Last Tango in Paris is another film of the same stripe. Many people have heard about it and anyone who has seen it has an opinion on it. The main opinion is that it’s filled with the sort of prurient material usually available only in a plain brown wrapper behind the checkout.

You know what? I’m going to make this quick and simple, and I’m not even going to bother with character names. A guy who owns a hotel(Marlon Brando) goes through the trauma of his wife killing herself. Before her body is cold, he seeks out an apartment to rent. While there, he meets a young woman (Maria Schneider) also looking for an apartment for her fiancé and her. The guy rents the place and keeps it as a sort of love shack for him and the young woman, who hook up and have all sorts of increasingly kinky sex until the end of the film. Because he’s looking for some sort of escape, he refuses to talk or allow her to talk about their past lives. Keep in mind that the Brando character is—and I’m not exaggerating here—prowling for sex the same day his wife dies. When he gets back from his initial romp with the girl, one of the maids is cleaning up the blood.

Really, that’s the movie. He deals with the loss of his wife, she deals with commitment issues, and the sex gets weirder and weirder and more and more uncomfortable to watch. And then a huge event happens that changes both of their lives, and the film ends.

I don’t want to sound like a prude here, but this film made me really uncomfortable. It has both everything and nothing to do with the sex. I don’t mind the sex, although I’m not always comfortable with erotica, but sex scenes are just another type of scene. It’s the participants here that make me want to look away.

Specifically, it’s Brando. The problem is that this is not the Brando of A Streetcar Named Desire or On the Waterfront or even Guys and Dolls. This is Brando the same year he made The Godfather. He’s losing what remains of his wispy hair, he’s getting paunchy (although he’s still a few years away from his eventual planetary mass), and he looks a lot like he should be somebody’s father. And the girl is less than half his age. He’s pushing 50 here, while Maria Schneider is about 20.

So, the question to ask yourself before watching this film is, “Do I want to see Brando’s flabby, slacks-covered ass making humpy-humpy motions?”

The scene that everyone talks about is the butter scene. For the uninitiated, allow me to paint a picture. During one of their frequent discussions, the Brando character decides to bring the kitchen into sex by quite literally buttering the girl’s ass and essentially raping her. The scene that so many people find titillating is thus a scene of buttery ass rape; all that’s missing is prison guards. When did unwanted, unlawful penetration with an assist by a condiment become sexy? Did I miss a meeting? If the buttered butt sex wasn’t enough, we later deal with a dead rat and physical abuse that is supposed to pass for sexy and doesn’t, culminating in some of the most abusive speech from Brando while she turns the butter scene back on him without the benefit of the butter. There’s plenty of frontal (and backal) nudity, but even that is sexy for about five seconds and becomes just more to make the film feel dirty.

Any film that deals with such material has to walk a fine line between artistic expression and borderline pornography or at least catering to the prurient interests of the audience. Ultimo Tango a Parigi erases the line and heads so far into the prurient that it becomes a turn off. Even early on, before the sex gets nasty, I have difficult time taking this seriously. Early on, our two characters sit in a post-coital clinch and she asks his name. He responds by saying he doesn’t want a name. He grunts for about 30 seconds and says that he’d rather that be his name. She tells him that her name is a series of ululations. I just can’t take that seriously. A grunt or two might make the intended point and be fairly typical post-coital speech—but this is excessive, as is so much else here.

While the sex is absolutely the thing that everyone concentrates on, there are a couple of plots going on around us here. First, we’ve got to deal with the girl and her fiancé (Jean-Pierre Leaud). He’s trying to make a film that stars her. She’s not sure she wants to marry him—of course she’s not really sure about anything else, either. Additionally, the Brando character needs to deal with the death of his wife and his with his in-laws, who he seems to abuse—particularly his mother-in-law.

Looking back at this film, I see that everything that isn’t disgusting is ridiculous. This is slightly more than two hours of my life I don’t get to have back. At least I don’t have to see it again. This is an ugly film about ugly people, and about as sexy as cardboard. For the first time ever, I've seen a film that takes place in Paris that doesn't make me want to go back to Paris.

Why to watch Ultimo Tango a Parigi: Because everyone tells you it’s filled with sexy-sexy.
Why not to watch: It’s about as sexy as a high colonic.