Two of the more appealing aspects of La Luna, 1979, are: a brave and eccentric performance by 1970s It-girl Jill Clayburgh, and director Bernardo Bertolucci’s unashamedly flamboyant eye for the baroque. The florid mix of operatic excess, heroin addiction and Oedipal couplings sure won’t be everyone’s sip of vino, but La luna is a fascinating relic of a time when studios still valued artistry in their output. Believe it or not, this is a 20th Century Fox-funded film.
Clayburgh inhabits the role of opera-diva Caterina Silveri with a ferocity that is astonishing. Having been widowed whilst living in New York, she accepts the lead role in a major new staging of Verdi’s works in Italy and immediately uproots her grieving teenage son Joe (Matthew Barry) to make the trip. She throws herself into her work (Clayburgh mimes long passages of operatic verse with a vein-bulging, red-faced intensity), and embraces a hedonistic lifestyle – failing to notice that her son has fallen in with a bad crowd, and is shooting heroin and burying his sadness under an awkward sexual awakening.
Her son’s addiction sounds a wake-up call, and Caterina initiates a cold-turkey phase of home rehabilitation. This has some regrettable physical consequences – first violent then sexual, in an uncomfortably-graphic manifestation of a woman’s loneliness and a young man’s weak spirit and confused sexuality. The scenes of incest are raw in emotion moreso than physicality, and they certainly don’t rival the boundary-pushing exploits of other Bertolucci works (The Conformist, 1970; Last Tango in Paris, 1972; The Dreamers, 2003). But such acts are still a cinematic taboo and not even the most character-driven or artistically-relevant representation can dim the potency of seeing them enacted.
Taking his cue from the grandiloquent stylings of classic opera, Bertolucci’s use of lush colours and wide vistas (under the guiding caress of the great cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro) to tell the most intimate of stories works, mostly. Composer Ennio Morricone leaps at the chance to play to the back row, and delivers one of his least subtle scores. And for those not enamoured with the indulgences of artists and the egos that drive their ambitions, Clayburgh’s Caterina may prove far too aloof, irresponsible and irksome.
But there is no denying it is a tour-de-force role for the actress who, at that stage of her career, was coming off two action/comedies (Silver Streak, 1976, and Semi-Tough, 1977) and had just been crowned the ultimate symbol of female empowerment after her lead in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978). La luna bombed in the US and has been hard to find in any of the home entertainment formats until now; Clayburgh sought comfort in the romantic-comedy genre (Starting Over, 1980; It’s My Turn, 1980; First Monday in October, 1981) but never reclaimed the career momentum she had leading into the release of her collaboration with Bertolucci (who would bounce back spectacularly with the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, 1987).
That there was a time when such a film – an examination of grief/incest/addiction set in the world of opera – was made with American backing at all seems extraordinary today. In 2007, Deborah Kampmeier premiered her 1950s-set Deep-South drama Hounddog, starring Dakota Fanning as a nine year-old rape victim. It barely saw a release and was the target of such a vehement outcry against its subject matter it has all but been buried ever since; a similar fate befell Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version of Nabokov’s Lolita.
La luna may not be the masterpiece all involved had intended it to be, but it is unlikely you will have the opportunity to experience a film so brazenly rich and ambitious from today’s filmmakers.
