If you really want to punish genius, just give it everything it wants.
This is a lesson told by countless grand artistic follies and it is etched with particular starkness by the contradictions between two movies ndash; 1970's The Conformist and 1976's 1900. Recently made available on DVD, the films were made by the once heavily genius-freighted Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci.
The son of an Italian poet, film critic and rural landowner, Bertolucci (born in 1940) grew up in an artistically nurturing, economically secure environment that was apparently conducive to prodigy: the boy was a published poet by age 12, a national prize-winning author by age 20, an assistant to the renowned filmmaker (and poet) Pier Paolo Pasolini at age 21 and, one year later, a full-fledged feature-film director in his own right.
At age 24 he stunned the European film world with the assurance of his second movie Before the Revolution and at age 30 he released two works ndash; The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist (based on a novel by the pre-eminent Italian novelist, Alberto Moravia) ndash; that effectively sealed Bertolucci's reputation as one of the world's most precociously gifted directors.
Two years later, the international success and controversy generated by Last Tango in Paris would lead to the offer that would eventually mark the beginning of Bertolucci's fall from grace ndash; the production of 1900.
While it had been the director's hope to follow Tango with an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, the movie's producer Alberto Grimaldi encouraged him to go much, much bigger ndash; epic big. And, thus, Bertolucci got the idea of using the story of two Italians born on the same day ndash; one a privileged landowner and the other a peasant ndash; whose tragically entwined lives would tell nothing short of the story of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, it is of such grandly unharnessed ambitions that disasters ndash; especially of the cinematic variety ndash; mdash; are too frequently made.
But first, a flashback of the kind the director himself once favoured (and which are both amply on display in the movies under consideration here): back to 1970, when the genius label was only beginning to be affixed to Bertolucci, and when he still had to make small movies that forced his imagination to find way of soaring above meagre circumstances. This brings us to The Conformist.
The story of an upper-class man named Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who turns to organized fascism in the 1930s as a means of being accepted as normal ndash; he has spent his life feeling shame and guilt over a childhood act involving sex, violence and a limo driver ndash; Bertolucci's adaptation of Moravia's novel is nothing short of a masterpiece of expressive economy.
Working with the young cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci came up with a simple but elegant visual design for the film that managed to reveal ndash; through symbolism, movement, architecture and lighting ndash; all we needed to know about this secretive, duplicitous and ultimately sad little monster.
The result was not only aesthetically arresting but almost uncommonly astute: a movie about the intersection of politics, history, psychology and sexuality, and how that collision resulted in a sensibility that was at once specific to the central character and applicable to the tragedy of an entire nation.
Where the modest scale of The Conformist meant Bertolucci was compelled to maximize the movie's metaphoric vocabulary, the multi-million-dollar grandiosity of 1900, which took nearly a year to shoot and summoned the financial participation of several countries, proved just how productive the director's particular brand of genius benefited from the restraint.
Dealing with many of the same themes ndash; sex, violence, politics and history ndash; but on a scale that spanned several decades, 1900, for all its individual moments of fetching beauty and compositional grandeur, is ultimately a high-minded, lead-footed and overstuffed howler of a movie.
Featuring a flounderingly miscast Robert De Niro as the aristocrat who drifts inertly toward fascism (and away from the proletarian salt embodied by G e rard Depardieu), and Donald Sutherland as a cartoonish Fascist, the movie (at its European release length of five hours and 15 minutes) tends to sprawl with the same elegant purposelessness as the customarily drunk and half-robed lady-of-the-manor Dominique Sanda.
While Bertolucci has remained productive and intermittently provocative, his career has never quite recovered from the unbounded praise of the early years.
True, there was the Oscar-winning success of 1987's porcelain-perfect The Last Emperor and the sporadic critical applause that has met such relatively intimate divergent recent projects as Stealing Beauty, Besieged and The Dreamers. But not many people are rushing up to slap the genius label on the director these days.
Not that they'd have to look far.
It still sits there, just at the director's feet, more or less exactly where it fell when complete artistic freedom first knocked it adrift.
Extras: Both discs contain multiple short documentaries on the production of the films.
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