In memory of Bernardo Bertolucci, director "The Dreamers" and "Last Tango in Paris"
November 26 in Rome, died director Bernardo Bertolucci. He was 77 years old. Author of "1900", "The Last Emperor", "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Dreamers", winner of the "Oscar" and "Golden Globe", winner of the Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, Bertolucci was one of the most famous Italian filmmakers.
His best - the most difficult, the most uncompromising and the most ruthless - the film was called "The Conformist". Bernardo Bertolucci himself was an implacable - not only convinced, but also born - enemy of any conformism. This was his position. It was his kind.
He did not have time to become one of the canonical classics of post-war Italian cinema, although he worked as an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini on the masterpiece "Accattone" and wrote with Dario Argento the script for the textbook spaghetti western Sergio Leone “Once Upon a Time in the West”. These two experiments obviously go back to his future dualism, Bertolucci - and the creator of uncompromising pictures about the fate of Europe ("The Grim Reaper", "Before the Revolution", "The Spider's Stratagem"), and the director of the monumental, completely Hollywood in spirit cosmopolitan projects ("Little Buddha" and Oscar-winning "The Last Emperor"). However, the most famous of his paintings - "Last Tango in Paris" and "1900" - resist this division: they combine locality with globality, lyrics and intimacy with an epic scale.
Perhaps the word "genius" in relation to the Italian director would be an exaggeration. He has enough frankly through pictures, and even in the strongest, there are scenes causing polite bewilderment over time. However, in some ways it was unique.
In an era when every self-respecting filmmaker was in conflict with his era, Bertolucci found the exact means to describe it in artistic language - and sometimes nail it to the pillory. The speculative parables ("The Spider's Stratagem" grew out of Borges prose, "Partner" - from "The Double" by Dostoevsky) became, in his interpretation, urgently relevant. In addition, even shooting about the past, the director always spoke about today. "The Conformist," although formally devoted to the rise of fascism in Italy, became the most accurate study of how the intellectual elite — in any country, at any time — betrays its ideals for the sake of elementary convenience.
Bertolucci was not afraid of anything, and his dizzy courage in the films of the difficult (but brilliant) fate of "1900" and "Last Tango in Paris" at this time of victorious political correctness seems insane. Few filmmakers felt this way and could show sexuality, both in its extreme manifestations and in completely innocent ones.
In his ability to see and convey beauty, he inherited not so much Italian cinema as Renaissance art, and, as a Renaissance man, he allowed himself a lot. Feel free to what others would call excessive. Beauty slipped away - but he managed to catch her. Although, of course, he would hardly have succeeded so much if it were not for the virtuoso operator Vittorio Storaro - a constant ally who shot all the best Bertolucci paintings. Together, they admired the beauty of the landscape - idyllically idyllically or frighteningly desolate. Together they watched how the expression of a human face betrayed concealed feelings and thoughts. Together, they found forms to show the transformations of the world, for which a great history compels him, and the resilience of a person capable of resisting these transformations - even if he is young and fragile. This is one of the latest and most personal films of Bertolucci, "The Dreamers".
Bernardo Bertolucci worked amazingly with the actors, demanding something incredible from them - and achieving a result that was beyond the power of others. Jean-Louis Trintignant in "The Conformist", Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu in "1900", Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in "Last Tango in Paris", Liv Tyler in "Stealing Beauty" and Eva Green in "The Dreamers" - all of them played Bertolucci roles that can be considered the best in life.
2003 at the Venice Film Festival, when journalists besieged the hall, where was the first show of "The Dreamers". Many were seated on the floor, on cold concrete steps. There was no such rush in Venice either before or after.
2012, when Bertolucci brought the film "Me and You" to Cannes - a small, modest, cozy and yet piercing one. The director was already in a wheelchair, forcing him to abandon many projects (in particular, from the film about the composer of the Renaissance Carlo Gesualdo), but still laughed off in response to any claims and planned to shoot further. It so happened that the painting "Me and You" was the last, and the strange and charming Italian version of "Space Oddity" David Bowie, sounding there, was a farewell to its author. Now this song as if coming from somewhere in space sends greetings from Bertolucci to us.
Wonderful tribute to a wonderful director.
The only and the one italian director to win an Oscar for Best Director. Goodbye Maestro
In the work of Bernardo Bertolucci constantly faced thick contrasts. He filled the visual row of his tapes with a game of light and shade. The images of the heroes of his films lined up on the opposite sides of human feelings. Plots about large-scale political upheavals showed against the background of chamber love stories. In addition, after the outstanding films produced frankly weak tapes. His career was unpredictable, like the Italian temperament. Moreover, his creative discoveries are explosive, like bursts of libido. Without his films in the cinema would be too little passion.