Concentration is needed

Press, 9 June 1980, Page 14

Concentration is needed

AT THE CINEMA

Hans Petrovic

La Luna Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Screenplay by Giuseppe Bertolucci, Cl?,re Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci. The raincoat brigade must be warned that in spite of some sensational publicity about such questionable activities as incest, “La-. Luna (Savoy) is not quite what they imagine it is cracked up fo be.

As with Bertolucci’s erotic “Last Tango in Paris,’’ the sexual sensation seeker probably will come out only disappointed and bored stiff.

However, “La Luna” is one of the most rewarding films of the year for those willing to keep their eyes and ears open to appreciate -the many surprises and sublte interplay, between the characters.

'ln contrast - to “Last Tango’s” claustrophobic, dark-j interior settings, the camera' sweeps across the Italian i countryside and the blue Mediterranean coast; through l

expensive apartments and opera houses; among ancient ruins, with the moon very often keeping a watchful eye. You may very well wonder what the moon has to do with all this,, and I can give no ready explanation here, except it may help to keep in mind that Bertolucci always has liked certain Freudian overtones in his movies.

Toward the film’s end, the son is drawing a moon with three eyes on the floor. Whatever else this may mean, it brings to mind “Kramer v Kramer,” which is advertised as a three-sided love story because it involves a father, mother and son. I wonder if something similar .was in the director’s mind here. The film follows the rather decadent lives, of a mother and her 15-year-old son; and there could be no better place for these kind of goings-on than Italy—tire original land of “La Dolce Vita,"

The woman (Jill Clayburgh) is an opera singer who has just been widowed and, with her son (Matthew Barry), decides to, travel through Italy on a singing tour. Both seem to be have been emotionally disturbed by the sudden death: sexually frustrated, it does not take much to guess what the mother is after; while the son seems to go off on some kind of oedipal quest. The boy has a small affair with a girl about his age. and Hie mother, thinking they are

making love, watches with fascinated horror when she discovers the girl actually is injecting a dose of heroin. Thereafter, he wanders off into the darker worlds of drugs and homosexuality. ■ Shocked by her son’s bisexual' leanings, she tries to restore him in the only way she. knows how, while also procuring a “fix” of heroin for him (“What have I done to you?”, she asks in one scene). Good heavens, who needs 'enemies if you have a mother Hike that? The very short drug taking !and masturbatory sex scenes are the . most harrowing in the whole, long film; which, otherwise, is clearly and sensually photoI graphed by Vittorio Storaro. How a film dealing with such questionable subject matter can be both powerful and beautiful is difficult to explain, but Bertoluccea 1 has succeeded