The son of a poet, Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci had the arts in his blood from the moment he was born. Originally intending to be a poet himself, Bertolucci ended up taking a different path than his father when he was hired as first assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1961 film Accattone. Bertolucci soon dropped out ofthe University of Rome and began his journey toward becoming one of the most revered and oftentimes controversial directors in all of Italian cinema.
A professed Atheist and Marxist, Bertolucci followed in Pasolini's path of rabble rousing and using film as a medium to warn his fellow countryman against a return to fascism. His first film as a director, 1962'sLa commare secca, borrowed from Kurosawa's Rashomon, using a prostitute's murder as the inciting incident and then utilizing extensive flashbacks to parse out the killer. His next film, 1963's Before the Revolution, was heavily influenced by the French New Wave, with Bertolucci becoming more overtly political in his work. This film, coupled with Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket, were considered precursors to Italy's involvement in the political protest movement of 1968.
The Conformist (1970)
By the time Bertolucci got to his fourth feature film in 1970, he was undeniably a leading voice in Italian cinema. His first film released that year, The Conformist, was perhaps his boldest screed against the dangers and, yes, conformity demanded by the fascist powers that once ruled his home country. French iconJean-Louis Trintignant plays a young Roman named Marcello who takes a job working for Mussollini in 1938, eventually working his way up to the role of paid assassin. His latest assignment finds him traveling to France to find and execute an old professor of his who fled the country when the fascists came to power.
The film decries the loss of identity required of those working in Mussolini's fascist regime, and though not quite as overt and graphic a statement as Pasolini's Salò, it is every bit as filled with anger at his country's past. Marcello's assignment to assassinate his former professor comes while he is on a honeymoon with his new wife, played by the positively radiant Stefania Sandrelli. Marcello receives the mission while traveling to France by train with his new bride, with Sandrelli appearing nude in a train car, a startling reminder of the life he must leave behind if he wishes to fulfill his duty to his country...
Upon arriving in Paris, Marcello finds himself taken by his former professor's young wife Anna, played by Bertolucci regular Dominique Sanda, actively pursuing her despite being newly married. Anna quickly catches on to Marcello's intentions to kill her husband and soon begins a counter-seduction, hoping that her amorous advances toward Marcello's wife will throw him off his mission...
The film illustrates the fickleness with which fascists are imbued, how their sensibilities can be easily swayed because they don't really stand for anything other than following orders. The film picked up an Oscar nomination, Bertolucci's first, for Best Adapted Screenplay, and is now recognized as one of the films that heralded Italian cinema's movement away from the more surreal works of directors like Federico Fellini and back to the neo-realist trend ushered in years earlier by Roberto Rossellini and Vittori De Sica, among others.
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
For his first film in English, Bertolucci plumbed the depths of his deepest and darkest sexual desires with 1972'sLast Tango in Paris. Among the most controversial films ever made, and rightly so, it's impossible to watch Bertolucci's sixth narrative feature today without knowing the extreme mental duress Maria Schneider endured from both her co-star Marlon Brando, and her director. Bertolucci had intended to cast Dominique Sanda as the female lead in the film, but when she became pregnant, he began his search for a new starlet.
Schneider was no novice when Bertolucci "discovered" her, having appeared in over a half dozen films in her native France. However, at only 19 years of age, she was still substantially younger than both Brando and Bertolucci, who used a number of manipulative techniques to elicit the performance they wanted from her. According to Schneider, Bertolucci would frequently withhold information about certain scenes from her in order to capture a more real and honest portrait of aggression and frustration from her.
For context, Brando plays an American living in Paris, mourning the death of his wife by suicide. While looking at an apartment for rent, he meets Schneider's character who is also interested in the apartment, and the two begin a torrid, anonymous sexual affair, with Brando wanting to know nothing about Schneider, while simultaneously offering her no personal details about his own life. Brando becomes increasingly controlling and obsessive, bringing us to the infamous "butter scene" which you can watch below in full...
Schneider has said time and again in interviews that she was not informed about the content of the scene and that Brando repeatedly ensured her that nothing untoward would happen to her during filming. Even without being actually physically assaulted, however, the scene took an obvious emotional toll on the actress and she has said repeatedly that the tears she sheds in the scene are real.
This begs the question, what amount of suffering for an actor can be deemed acceptable? Is it okay that Stanley Kubrick harangued Shelley Duvall mercilessly for months on end in order for her to achieve the frazzled mental state he wanted herin because the end result,The Shining, is a great film? Does achieving greatness absolve you of any actions you took in order to achieve that greatness? These are not questions I can answer in a way that will satisfy everyone, which is what makes them such good topics for discussion.
I always subscribed to the notion that pain is temporary, but art is forever, but I never thought of the potential for ignored collateral damage such a statement wields.For me, that phrase meant, suck it up and walk on that broken ankle for one more take. Your foot will heal but the film will fall apart without this shot. That kind of thing is much more understandable. The fact of the matter is that some wounds do not heal. Not through time or avoidance or any other means at our disposal, and as a viewer, you must have your own moral compass that determines your viewing habits.
People can say, "I don't watch Roman Polanski films because he's a terrible human being," and all I can think is that they're cheating themselves out of at least two of the greatest films ever made by instituting such a policy.But even that situation is removed from the making of any of his films. Yes, he may be a terrible person off set, but at least he comported himself properly on set. I'm not entirely sure the same could be said for Bertolucci with Last Tango.
1900 (1976)
Hot off his first Best Director Oscar nomination for Last Tango, Bertolucci took nearly four years to complete his next film, the absolutely epic in every sense of the word film 1900. The film is a star-studded affair, not only reuniting the director with Dominique Sanda, but also pairing two of the biggest actors at the time in their respective countries: The U.S.'s Robert De Niro and France's Gerard Depardieu. The film opens in 1945 on the day of Italy's liberation from fascism, before flashing back to the titular year and introducing the wealthy Alfredo (eventually played by De Niro) and the working class Olmo (eventually played by Depardieu).
The two remain friends throughout their lives, often crossing paths despite their diverging family backgrounds and eventual diverging political beliefs. Alfredo falls in with the fascists, while Olmo leads his fellow workers in revolt against their encroaching threat. The film's sprawling runtime of 317 minutes allows the audience plenty of time to get to know both men and come to understand their disparate beliefs. 2 hours into the film, the two friends visit a prostitute played by Stefania Casini, who offers them a discounted rate if they'll agree to be, ahem, serviced at the same time...
It's one of the most famous nude scenes in history, if for no other reason than it features two very well-known actors—De Niro was only two years removed from his first Oscar win—getting jacked off on screen. It's a shockingly explicit scene for a director who had begun trafficking regularly in such things, and his sexual proclivities would only get darker from here.
La Luna (1979)
For his next feature, 1979's La Luna, Bertolucci dove deeper into the world of sexual deviancy with the tale of a forbidden love between a mother and her 14 year old heroin addicted son. Jill Clayburgh stars as opera singer Caterina, who moves with her son to Italy following the death of her husband, hoping that this will help her son have a clean break from the depressing life they had been leading in New York City. Nothing in Italy goes according to plan, however, with the son becoming addicted to heroin and finding himself increasingly attracted to his mother.
Desperate to keep him from falling back into addiction, Caterina eventually gives her son a handjob, which ultimately does nothing to keep him from his addiction, but further damages their own relationship. Thankfully the explicit stuff is kept offscreen, but the implications are strong enough to make this yet another sexually controversial film from Bertolucci. The film's only nude scene comes an hour and five minutes in when Clayburgh strips nude to take a shower...
The Last Emperor (1987)
I hate the word "sumptuous" but it really is one of the only words that do this film and its breathtaking cinematography by Vittorio Storaro any justice. The Last Emperor was my favorite film that I saw in the very first film criticism class that I took, and also the hardest for me at the time to articulate its many merits. The film itself brought worldwide acclaim and earned Bertolucci two Oscars for writing and directing.
The film employs the same storytelling device that nearly all of Bertolucci's films uses, starting near the end of the story before flashing back to the beginning. John Lone plays Puyi, the titular last emperor of China who came to power as a small child. Like a great many of Bertolucci's protagonists, Puyi has a complicated relationship with sex. The film's only nudity comes early in the film when we first meet him as a child and he is being breastfed by his mother, played by Jade Go...
Another breastfeeding scene follows not long after, with the film departing from nudity altogether at this point. Puyi's relationship with women further on his life is no less strange, while always remaining firmly within the constraints of the film's PG-13 rating, another first for the director. Desperate to escape his role as emperor, Puyi marries Wanrong, played by the gorgeous Joan Chen. Their wedding night scene finds Chen in a sheer nightgown with her breasts clearly visible beneath...
Stealing Beauty(1996)
Bertolucci returned to the world of full blown sexuality with his 1996 film Stealing Beauty, featuring stars-on-the-rise Liv Tyler and Rachel Weisz. Tyler plays 19-year old Lucy, whose recently deceased mother was a poet who often regaled her with stories of her time spent at a Tuscan villa with artist friends. Lucy embarks on a journey to Tuscany to learn more about her mother, and here she meets, among others, Miranda Fox, played by the gorgeous Weisz, who is introduced sunbathing by a pool with her boobs and bush exposed...
One of her mother's friends, Ian, is an artist who is taken by Lucy's beauty and convinces her to pose for him. Tyler lowers her dress, exposing her left breast as she poses for the artist...
The film is full of beautiful people in beautiful locales and there's a great number of gorgeously shot scenes that involve sex and sexuality. It's an obvious precursor to the work of current Italian directors like Luca Guadanino andPaolo Sorrentino, and its influence can be felt in such films as the former's A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name, and the latter's The Great Beauty and Youth.
The Dreamers (2003)
For his penultimate film, Bertolucci travels back toParis and the days of his early career with The Dreamers. Much like the Manson Family murders were considered the end of the peace and love movement in America, the 1968 Parisian student riots were equally influential in killing off the Bohemian spirit that had flooded France throughout the 60s.Michael Pitt stars as a young American student named Matthew, who travels to Paris to study French and ends up in a romantic entanglement with French twins Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green, in her screen debut).
At 22, Green had been urged by both her agent and her parents to avoid taking the role in the film due to the copious amounts of explicit content, but she did it anyway and we're reaping all the benefits. As any heterosexual male would be, Matthew finds himself very taken by Isabelle, falling hard for her and though the wait is long for Green's first nude scene, which comes at the 48-minute mark, she barely keeps her clothes on for the duration of the film...
Not long after this, Green appears fully nude, removing Pitt's pants in the bathroom while Garrel restrains him...
The next nude scene brings an extreme close-up of Green's bush, helping the film earn its NC-17 rating...
Perhaps Green's most famous nude scene from the film comes when she apesAlexandros of Antioch's famous Venus De Milo sculpture, sporting long black gloves that make her arms disappear into the black background...
The film's fluid sexuality was somewhat novel for 2003, but it was right in line with many of the themes Bertolucci had been exploring throughout his career from bisexuality to familial sexual relationships. 16 years on, it's not quite as revolutionary as it was upon release, but it's still a film dripping with sexuality in all its many forms.
When Bertolucci passed away last November, his legacy was overshadowed by the stories of his on-set behavior while making Last Tango in Paris. While we are most assuredly living in more "enlightened" times when it comes to such issues, I don't think it's fair to judge all of his work by this one film. That's not excusing his behavior, but these stories must also be taken in the context of a broader picture of an otherwise stellar career. Most, if not all, of the other actors who worked for him over the years had nothing but glowing endorsements for Bertolucci and his work, and I certainly hope that these are the stories that will dominate future conversations about him as a filmmaker.
Other Bernardo Bertolucci Films with Nudity Not Covered in This Column
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
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All non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
