THE new Bernardo Bertolucci film, Besieged - a modestly scaled chamber piece which originated as a one-hour project for Italian television - takes the Oscar-winning director full circle, back to his roots in low-budget, issues-driven drama where he started out with his first feature, La Commare Secca (The Grim Reaper) in 1962.
In those intervening 27 years Bertolucci came to the forefront of European filmmakers with his sophisticated, intellectually acute adaptations of Borges and Moravia in The Spider's Stratagem and The Conform- ist; he attracted a torrent of international controversy with Last Tango in Paris; he mounted a hugely ambitious socialist epic in 1900; and swept the board at the Oscars with another epic, The Last Emperor.
Bernardo Bertolucci was born in Parma on March 16th, 1940, the son of a poet and film critic. As a boy, Bernardo himself turned to poetry and some of his work was published in periodicals before he was 12. By the time he was 20 and a university student in Rome, he had won a national poetry award, the Viareggio prize, for the collection, In Search of Mystery. In his teens Bertolucci had developed a passion for the cinema and he experimented with a number of amateur films on 16mm. In 1961, he dropped out of college to work as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini's first feature film, Accatone, a hard-edged slice of social realism dealing with a young pimp from the slums of Rome.
A year later, at the age of 22, Bertolucci made his own first feature in The Grim Reaper, heavily influenced by Pasolini, who had suggested its outline story. Bertolucci began to find his own voice with his second feature, Before the Revolution, which was set in his native Parma. Francesco Barilli played a fervent young Marxist grappling with a stifling, middle-class upbringing and leaving his girlfriend to get involved in an affair with his aunt. It was inspired by Stendhal, while Bertolucci's next film, Partner, was heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and very much a film of its time, imbued with the revolutionary spirit of 1968. A loose reworking of Dostoevsky's The Double, it featured Pierre Clementi as a shy, confused young man who invents a more confident double for himself.
Over the next two years Bertolucci emerged as one of world cinema's most original and intelligent film-makers with his heady, multi-layered treatments of Borges and Moravia in The Spider's Stratagem (1969) and The Conformist (1970), respectively. Both were rooted in examinations of Fascism.
Based on the Borges story, Theme of the Traitor and the Hero - which Bertolucci transposed from Ireland to Italy - The Spider's Stratagem featured Giulio Brogi as a young man investigating the murder of his father by the Fascists in 1936 - only to discover that his father was a traitor.
The Moravia adaptation, The Conformist, featured the great Jean-Louis Trintignant in a rich, complex portrayal of a cowardly, sexually confused Fascist ordered to organise the assassination of his former professor. An intricate and sensual film, this dispassionately observed tragedy remains riveting all the way to its unforgettable final images of its hopelessly weak chameleon-like protagonist.
The film's striking visual style marked one of the most assured and imaginative of the many collaborations between Bertolucci and the gifted lighting cameraman, Vittorio Storaro - and that style was to influence the new generation of maverick film-makers beginning to make their mark in America.
BERTOLUCCI'S next film proved to be one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema. The bitterly melancholic Last Tango in Paris (1972) was an art film with a Hollywood star (Marlon Brando) which became an international cause celebre, and condemned in the director's native Italy as "obscene, indecent and catering to the lowest instincts of the libido".
A psychodrama which startled audiences with its ground-breaking sexual frankness, it featured Brando in a towering performance as a middle-aged, world-weary man whose wife has committed suicide, and Maria Schneider as the young bride-to-be he meets in a vacant apartment. The raw, brutal nature of their various sexual couplings unsettled audiences in a movie bereft of hope, although the film inevitably suffered from the imbalance between Brando and Schneider in terms of experience, narrative emphasis and depth of character.
Four years later and firmly established as an international - as against Italian, or even European - film-maker, Bertolucci went on to mount a hugely ambitious project in the bold, underestimated socialist epic, 1990, which spanned the first 45 years of this century. Its social and political history hung on a narrative thread following the interlinked destinies of two men born on the same day at the beginning of the century.
One (an uncomfortably cast Robert De Niro) is the grandson of a wealthy landowner (Burt Lancaster), the other (a superb Gerard Depardieu) the grandson of a peasant leader (Sterling Hayden). First screened in a five-and-half-hour cut at Cannes, 1900 eventually was released in a two-part format running at around four hours. While its politics were at times rendered simplistic and naive in Bertolucci's grand, operatic scheme of things, it achieved a powerful dramatic sweep and created some quite extraordinary sequences.
Unfortunately, the Dublin Film Festival retrospective omits both 1900 and the underrated Oedipal drama La Luna, which followed in 1979. This time the influence is Verdi for an immensely stylish picture of the incestuous relationship which forms between a renowned opera diva (Jill Clayburgh) and her rebellious teenage son (Matthew Barry). Nor does the Dublin retrospective include Bertolucci's more lowkey and introspective 1981 film, the compelling Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, in which a self-made man (Ugo Tognazzi) seeks out his kidnapped son and realises how little he really knew about the young man.
Bertolucci spent the next four years immersed in meticulous preparation for his grandly realised The Last Emperor, a painterly and fascinating epic account of the Chinese emperor Pu Yi's journey from a spoiled childhood on the throne to his final years working as a gardener. Rich in detail and making gorgeous use of colour and design, its epic style did not detract from its intimate observation of its subject.
It was nominated for - and won - nine Oscars, providing Bertolucci with the impetus and the financial backing for a pair of much less well-received exotic projects in The Sheltering Sky, a visually accomplished but dramatically limited adaptation from Paul Bowles, and Little Buddha, a visual treat which fail to disguise its essential lack of substance. The downward slide continued with the insufferably glib and tedious Stealing Beauty, a shallow picture of a young American woman (Liv Tyler) undergoing a protracted sexual awakening in Tuscany.
Where Bertolucci goes from here at the age of 59 remains an enticing prospect, all the more so now that he has declared his interest in returning to the smaller-scaled, more personal projects with which he made his name.
Bernardo Bertolucci will be a guest at the festival. On Sunday, April 25th, he will introduce his latest film, Besieged, and participate in a public interview with Michael Dwyer at 1.50 p.m.
