Tag Archives: Bernardo Bertolucci

Prima della Rivoluzione (1964) Bernardo Bertolucci, Adriana Asti, Francesco Barilli, Allen Midgette, Drama, Romance

Prima della Rivoluzione (1964)
Parma, 1962. Fabrizio, a young student, warns of the difficulty of reconciling the middle class with the militancy of the Italian Communist Party. He remains traumatized by the death of his friend Agostino, who has drowned in the River Po. The arrival of Aunt Gina, an elegant young lady who lives in Milan, increases his worries. The aunt falls in love with him and Fabrizio reciprocates. But the aunt returns to Milan. Fabrizio, conscious of his own weakness and his inability to realize his aspirations and political ambitions, chooses to go along with convention. He gives up Gina and marries Clelia, a beautiful young girl who comes from a respectable family.
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Il conformista / The Conformist (1970) Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Drama

Il conformista (1970)
This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello’s mind.
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La luna / Luna (1979) Bernardo Bertolucci, Jill Clayburgh, Matthew Barry, Veronica Lazar

La luna (1979)
Recently widowed American opera diva Caterina takes her teenaged son Joe with her on a long singing tour to Italy. Absorbed in her hectic work in various Verdi operas around Rome, Caterina is soon shocked to discover that her troubled and lonely son has become a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to wean the youth off the drug result in an incestuous relationship, but also in a possibility to reunite Joe–maybe even herself–with his real father, whose existence she has kept a secret from him.
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L’assedio / Besieged (1998) Thandie Newton, David Thewlis, Claudio Santamaria, Bernardo Bertolucci

Besieged (1998)
When an African dictator jails her husband, Shandurai goes into exile in Italy, studying medicine and keeping house for Mr. Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer. She lives in one room of his Roman palazzo. He besieges her with flowers, gifts, and music, declaring passionately that he loves her, would go to Africa with her, would do anything for her. “What do you know of Africa?,” she asks, then, in anguish, shouts, “Get my husband out of jail!” The rest of the film plays out the implications of this scene and leaves Shandurai with a choice.
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