‘Joie de Vivre. Notes, Thoughts, Words, Reflections, Faces, And Visions Concerning Bernardo Bertolucci And The Cinephilia Of The 20th Century That No Longer Exists’ Review: So Long, Maestro! – Venice Film Festival

Ostensibly a tribute to the late Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018), the one-time giant of Italian cinema whose star has waned somewhat in recent years, Luca Guadagnino’s 426-minute docu-essay — nearly twice as long as Alex Gibney’s Musk — is the endurance test of this year’s Venice Film Festival. Surprisingly, however, watched in two sittings, it is less of an ordeal than it might appear, partly thanks to the director’s forthright views: from the outset, Guadagnino admits that certain titles in the late maestro’s filmography are just too rubbish to bother with. No Beseiged. No Little Buddha. No Stealing Beauty. Hooray! There’s a roundabout quality to Joie de Vivre that works best in first half, which is much stronger than the second. Guadagnino’s approach is very personal, snooping around the director’s former home in Rome — Via della Lungara, 3, if you’re planning a pilgrimage — he seems to be actively trying to summon the late auteur’s ghost. The house is just as Bertolucci left it (and therefore just as his widow, Clare Peploe left it, before she died in the summer of 2021). Somehow, the house still feels alive with his presence, and one wonders if he might come barging into his study at any minute, furiously denying that the DVD copy of Promising Young Woman on display in any way belongs to him. Guadagnino comes at Bertolucci from many angles, even claiming to have fancied him as a younger man, but facts and figures don’t really seem to enter into his concept of biography. Bertolucci just bursts onto the screen, fully formed, with his first ‘official’ feature film, Before the Revolution (1964). Technically, this was actually his second film after 1962’s The Grim Reaper, but Guadagnino will return to that later. The director, it transpires, has pressganged a lot of his friends and peers to help him out, and to discuss Bertolucci’s first international breakout hit, he wheels out a big gun: Martin Scorsese. Watch on Deadline Scorsese was an early convert to Bertolucci’s reinvention of Italian cinema, having caught a screening of Before the Revolution at the New York Film Festival. “The new voice had arrived,” he says. “And I was there.” Scorsese leads an impressive cavalcade of directors that are as perceptive as they are surprising: Catherine Breillat, Alfonso Cuarón, David Cronenberg, Abderrahmane Sissako and… wait a minute, is that James Gray? (It is.) Guadagnino’s next stop is The Conformist (1970) swiftly followed by Last Tango in Paris (1972), the one-two punch that set him up as a major player in world cinema. The former made him an arthouse deity, the second brought him notoriety and very nearly jail time. At this point, Guadagnino drafts in friends from the other side of the divide — critics and media commentators such as Jay Weissberg, Scott Foundas, Murielle Joudet, Oyku Sofuoglu and… wait a minute, is that “contrarian analyst” Armond White? (It is.) The debate about Last Tango is the chewy center of this otherwise freewheeling production, and this also where the film starts to find its feet. Last Tango is perhaps the perfect film to hold up to the light, since it has accrued many meanings in the half-century since release. Its sexual politics once seemed so liberal, and now they very much do not, a paradox Guadagnino digs into: Has the world changed or have we changed? He also has the director’s back, defending Bertolucci from misguided allegations that the film’s famous butter scene was somehow done for real and improvised without the actress’s knowledge. Nevertheless, there’s a fascinating discussion about the imbalance of power on set, and it’s probably just as well the interval occurs here. The second half begins with Bertolucci’s masterpiece, the self-explanatory 1900 (1976), a period epic featuring, together for the first time, Robert de Niro and Gerard Depardieu. There’s a scene of front-frontal male nudity (or rather there was in the festival cut) that’s still an eye-opener today, and, as special guest star Margot Robbie points out, “The greatest cocaine scene ever”. Which brings us swiftly on to La Luna (1976), the jaw-dropping — and thus almost impossible to see nowadays — story about an incestuous mother and her junkie son (“It approached heroin in a joyfully unexpected way”). Guadagnino spends a surprising amount of time on Bertolucci’s almost completely uninteresting last film, Me and You (2012), before barging into Jeremy Thomas’s house and talking all over him, as the latter tries to discuss his two films with Bertolucci, The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990). The Dreamers (2003) gets no coverage at all — even though Bertolucci’s affection for the nouvelle vague is catalogued in the first half — and Guadagnino ends his film with a forlorn elegy for the past (“The cinema I grew up with is gone”). Which is true, but then people said that in 1927, when sound arrived. The ostensible subject matter of the film, Bernardo Bertolucci, often gets pushed aside by Guadagnino and co., even while the speakers onscreen complain that Bertolucci was often pushed aside as a filmmaker. (It happens; we know that.) Those digressions are interesting, for sure, but it makes for a frustrating experience; one minute Guadagnino is in Marty’s screening room, bowing at the altar, the next he’s being dragged round a desolate field, talking philosophy by a woman with a very stern expression and even more forbidding hair. Bertolucci was “taking reality and making it eternal”, says a talking head, in a film that takes reality and, at times, simply makes it seem eternal. Title: Joie de Vivre. Notes, Thoughts, Words, Reflections, Faces, And Visions Concerning Bernardo Bertolucci And The Cinephilia Of The 20th Century That No Longer Exists’ ReviewFestival: Venice (Venice Open – Out Of Competition)Director: Luca GuadagninoWorld sales: HanwayRunning time: 7 hrs 6 mins