Bertolucci

A Tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci

This year’s MIFF is dedicated to two cinematic giants whom we’ve lost since last year’s festival. One, Verna Bloom, was a frequent MIFF guest and friend. The other is Bernardo Bertolucci, who was never able to make it here because of the back condition stemming from a fall and failed sur gery that kept him confined to a wheelchair and otherwise limited during the last five years of his life. His lovely, little-known final film, Me and You, was featured at the festival when it was made, and he has been a presence here, as he has in so much of the world, with his towering, simultaneously epic and intimate films; just last year, for instance, with our screenings of two of his most staggering works, The Conformist and 1900, introduced by one of their stars, Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Dominique Sanda.

A committed leftist and a committed explorer of sexual and emotional intensity and intimacy, with an overwhelming cinematic command—and a wry and unexpected sense of humor that pops up when least expected— Bertolucci made films that could not be ignored for two reasons: because he refused to stop where even great conventional filmmakers did; and because he was a towering artistic genius born to make movies, as Picasso was to paint. Sometimes his films were met with great public and critical recognition. (And who else would have accepted their Oscar [for The Last Emperor, which won nine, including Best Director and Best Film], by saying “If New York is the Big Apple, to me, Hollywood, tonight, is The Big Nipple?”). Sometimes they were not, or met with huge controversy (as with Last Tango in Paris, a film—like virtually all of his work—that remains vital, relevant, and demanding years, decades later, today). His next to last film, The Dreamers, has the same youthful vitality, sexuality, idealism, and joy that his work from almost 40 years earlier had. What a loss for us, for everyone. What a gift to have had his work, and to have it still to watch, as we will at MIFF this year.

Rare 35mm print! The Dreamers

France/Italy/UK—2003—35mm—115 Minutes

In English and in French with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay: Gilbert Adair, based on his novel

Producer: Jeremy Thomas

Cast: Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Jean-Pierre Léaud

Print courtesy: Fox Searchlight Pictures

The tumultuous political landscape of Paris in 1968 is the backdrop as three young cineastes (stunningly incarnated by Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel) are drawn together through their passion for film. Matthew, an American exchange student, discovers in French twins Theo and Isabelle a relationship unlike anything he has ever experienced or will ever encounter again–and he longs to be a part of it. “Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is an ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger, and transform the spirit. The film also touches on politics, but politics at a time when politics was also inseparable from fantasy—the spring of 1968, in Paris—a period of student protest and riots. Three young cinephiles shut the door of their Paris apartment and barely leave it, creating an emotional and sexual psychodrama as the world outside beckons, threatens, and influences their interaction”—Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle.

Sponsored by Julie Miller-Soros

New 4K DCP restoration!

Last Tango in Paris

Italy/France—1972—DCP—126 Minutes

In English and in French with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Agnès Varda

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi

Music: Gato Barbieri

Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud

Print courtesy: Park Circus Films

Pauline Kael, perhaps the most important movie critic in American history (see What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael elsewhere in this year’s festival), said this in The New Yorker when Last Tango in Paris first appeared in 1972: “Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history....Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives. Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening. Carried along by the sustained excitement of the movie, the audience had given Bertolucci an ovation, but afterward, as individuals, they were quiet....Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?” What else is there to say now? A lot.

Saturday, July 13, 9:30 p.m., WOH

Wednesday, July 17, 6:30 p.m., RR1

Wednesday, July 17, 9:30 p.m., WOH

Thursday, July 18, 6:30 p.m., RR1