THE SHELTERING SKY
With Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall, Eric Vu-An, and Paul Bowles.
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Many of my friends and colleagues regard Bertolucci’s last film, The Last Emperor, as impersonal, and they frequently allude to the blockbusters of David Lean by way of comparison. That’s an opinion I don’t subscribe to at all. For me, the personal side of Bertolucci is fundamentally bound up in a struggle to reconcile Freud and Marx–more specifically, a struggle to reconcile oedipal hang-ups with the precepts of Italian communism. It’s a struggle Bertolucci virtually inherited from his first mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bertolucci began as assistant director on Pasolini’s first feature, Accattone, and Pasolini provided the story for Bertolucci’s first feature, The Grim Reaper). It also forms much of the basis for his second feature, Before the Revolution, and most of his other films, including The Conformist, The Spider’s Strategy, 1900, and Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man. And it certainly is at the core of The Last Emperor, in spite of the fact that the film is set in China, Manchukuo, and Siberia rather than Italy.
I suspect that some people have resisted the idea that The Last Emperor is personal because of a half-buried bias against socially conscious films that originated in early American auteurism, a bias that still persists in many quarters. “The sociologically oriented film historians . . . looked on the Hollywood canvas less as an art form than as a mass medium,” Andrew Sarris wrote in his preface to The American Cinema (1969), the bible of auteurism. “Hollywood directors were regarded as artisans rather than as artists, and individual movies were less often aesthetically evaluated than topically synopsized.” There was enough truth in this charge to give Sarris’s “discoveries”–directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Sam Fuller, and Nicholas Ray, whom he was proposing were artists rather than “mere” entertainers or studio hacks–the force of a revelation. But that revelation came at the price of excluding most socially conscious films from artistic consideration.
Make the leading fictional characters closer to their “real-life” counterparts. This is the sort of vulgar premise that can be found in such awful movies as Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and Mishima, both of which combine biographical material and loosely autobiographical short stories by their authors in a manner designed to obfuscate the point at which “real life” ends and fiction begins. The idea is that we only read the fiction in order to learn about the authors’ lives–“personal” auteurism with a vengeance, albeit transferred to a literary mode. As a consequence, undoing the artistry of the artists becomes part of the process of getting the goods on them.
Add excess cultural baggage. Specific literary and film references that crop up in the film–an early upside-down close-up of Port that recalls the opening shot of Orson Welles’s Othello; a glimpse of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood in Kit’s handbag; posters for a couple of French auteurist favorites, Max Ophuls’s Sans lendemain and Jean Gremillon’s Remorques–tend to be more decorative than meaningful. It’s true that part of Othello was shot in North Africa, that Nightwood deals in a baroque fashion with sexual and romantic frustration, and that Sans lendemain and Remorques are both love stories. But if this is all Bertolucci had in mind, dozens of other cultural artifacts might have served just as well. Apart from semignomic literary quotes that precede each of the novel’s three sections, Bowles’s novel got along nicely without such decor.
