At a time when communism seems moribund, it’s ironic that Paramount Pictures is reissuing Bernardo Bertolucci’s spectacular utopian socialist drama 1900.
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Starting today, the Music Box is screening the complete 311-minute director’s cut, with more than 70 minutes restored to the version Paramount released in 1976 (the same version that’s now available on video). It is split into two parts, both of which will be shown each evening. The most notorious “new” footage (and the cause of the NC-17 rating) is a sequence depicting a menage-a-trois between a prostitute and the film’s stars, Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu.
Nobody with even a passing interest in either Bertolucci or cinema should pass up the chance to see this flawed masterpiece about the intertwining fates of two boys born on the same day in 1901 (not coincidentally, the date of Verdi’s death in northern Italy). De Niro is the gilded son of landowners, Depardieu the bastard son of peasants who work the land. Their lives parallel the vast social and political changes in Italy during the first half of this century.
