Summary:
An epic tale of class struggle in Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends- one wealthy, one poor.
My Thoughts:
You know, I really didn’t think it was possible for a movie to receive a Two Star rating from me, but I somehow still feel compelled to tell certain people they should give it a chance (though, maybe not this particular cut of the film). This movie is five hours and seventeen minutes long, so, naturally, this movie is a lot of things: there are scenes that are absolutely amazing, scenes that are ludicrous, scenes that are needlessly graphic, and scenes that are relatively touching, but in the end, I couldn’t have told you what Bertolucci was trying to say with this incredibly lengthy piece; he touches on so many themes that, in the end, they all get lost in the shuffle, and he ends up just screaming incoherently at you about times passed.
Though he struggles with an overall theme for “1900”, I still think Bertolucci is a great director (see “The Last Emperor”), and I think even in this film, he has produced many great and memorable scenes. I would say this feels like Bertolucci’s answer to Fellini’s much better (and much shorter) film “Armarcord”, which came out three years before this film and deals with many of the same themes (only more coherently). I just think Bertolucci’s ambition got the best of him; he tried to do too much, and in doing too much, he undermined a lot of his own great work.
I think some of the best scenes of the film come at the very beginning, when our protagonists are children (played in their adulthood by Robert DeNiro, “The Irishman”, and Gerard Depardieu, “Danton”), and they are learning how to perceive the world. There are a number of scenes when Bertolucci shows the viewer an experience from both Alfredo (Deniro) and Olmo’s (Depardieu) perspectives, and one of the most memorable was when the boys experience the deaths of their Grandfathers. Alfredo’s grandfather is a wealthy landowner whom takes advantage of whomever he can whenever he can; he commits suicide relatively early on, and even the servant who comes to cut the man down seems to have little respect for the man, taunting him about how he couldn’t take it anymore. Olmo’s grandfather is a hardworking laborer whom is liked by almost everyone, and he dies reclining in the shade next to his grandson. Bertolucci does his best to sort of illustrate the differences between the two people as if they represent the two classes overall; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Perhaps the best scene in the film shows the landowners ordering the execution of peasants; as the male peasants prepare to fight, the females lay down in the street, blocking the landowner’s hired soldiers. It’s incredibly powerful, for it shows that even though the wealthy have the money and the land, the poor can still fight back and demand some sort of justice.
Honestly, even though this film did have a ton of glaring story issues, my biggest issue with it was the amount of animal cruelty that was needlessly infused into this storyline. There’s one scene where Olmo butchers of a pig. Another scene when Attilla Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland, “Don’t Look Now”) straps a yowling kitten to a wall with a belt (onscreen) and headbutts it (offscreen) to illustrate what must be done to destroy communism (the metaphor doesn’t even make sense, so they just tortured this poor cat for no reason). But the worst scene is when the boys are young, and Olmo and Alfredo meet for the first time; Olmo collects more than twenty frogs and sews them together on a line (through the bottom of their mouth and out the top of their heads), and wears them around his hat while the boys play in a field for probably fifteen minutes. The whole time this scene was going on, those poor frogs were squirming all over the place and trying to get free- I could barely even concentrate on what the kids were talking about.
Verdict:
There are a few absolutely brilliant sequences in this movie, but that’s not enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who isn’t a hardcore cinephile; if you are a huge cinephile, there are some moments that are worth watching. Though this film is five hours and seventeen minutes long, I never really felt bored (granted it is split up into two relatively equal parts and I took a break to walk my dog in between). Bertolucci is a good director, this film is just a bit too much of, well, everything to say much of anything at all. I know there are many edits of this film somewhere (IMDb has four cuts listed, I watched the longest one), so if you can find a shorter cut, you might have more luck with this film than I.
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