A four-season saga of impotent gentry, lusty communists, perverse fascists, and dead animals, at 315 minutes NOVECENTO is not exactly bloated, but not quite interesting enough to justify its immense running time. There is simply not enough event to fill five hours. It's Bertolucci's HEAVEN'S GATE: the self-indulgent monster a director gets away with once in his career, just after a stunning success like Cimino's DEER HUNTER, or in this case LAST TANGO. But every third scene is just beautiful - intensely acted, lusciously filmed, passionately directed.
What's interesting is that this simplified vision of Italian history, as portrayed in 50 years of exploitation, dissipation and failed revolution on a country estate, doesn't look or feel particularly Italian. This isn't because it's populated by French and American leads - Sterling Hayden, for instance, is utterly convincing as a Bolognese peasant. And it's not the direction per se, as there are flashes of neorealism and occasional moments of genuine Roman hysteria here, including most of the last hour. But its universal themes, methodical pace and visual style make this movie less an Italian drama than a generically European soap opera. As paean to the land it is Dutch, lit like a Vermeer and composed like a Rembrandt; as political polemic it's Russian, with Gerard Depardieu declaiming Marxism into the camera as if he's standing in front of the Winter Palace; as romance it's French, if anything, though Flaubert's disillusioned housewives were never this bland.
There are many singularities about NOVECENTO. It's certainly the only picture to feature the penises of not merely Depardieu and Robert De Niro but Sterling Hayden; it's probably the last movie to represent cocaine as a harmless diversion; I hope it's the sole film to feature a horse anus massaged until it deposits a load into someone's hands. Most impressively, to my knowledge it's the single movie to capture the whole breadth of Donald Sutherland's talent. He is charming, funny, drunken, sadistic, swaggering, boorish, pathetic, scary, and obsequious. It is a rare film role, and an even rarer supporting turn, that allows an actor so much room; it is an uncommon actor indeed who can fill it.
The same cannot be said of Depardieu's character, who unfortunately has only one face to make in the whole thing, nor De Niro's work, which is as unconvincing here as he was electrifying the same year in TAXI DRIVER. This performance ranks with his most uninspired late 90s shtick. Dominique Sanda, Laura Betti and Alida Valli are outrageously good in their limited roles, as are Hayden, Lancaster and a variety of Italian nationals. But the script wholly degenerates as the film wears on, taking an unhappy turn from pastoral eloquence to symbolist rhetoric. By the end nobody's got anything worth doing except Sutherland, and then he's dead and we've got twenty more minutes of tired verite speechifying.
But it looks absolutely great all the way through. Though his obvious influences are so various and often so pretty, Vittorio Storaro's most striking images here are of things dead and dying: a hat crowned with gigged, squirming frogs; shot ducks twisting and drowning in a canal; a fleeing fascist impaled by farm implements. Not to mention the butchered hogs and raped women and children.
What's interesting is that this simplified vision of Italian history, as portrayed in 50 years of exploitation, dissipation and failed revolution on a country estate, doesn't look or feel particularly Italian. This isn't because it's populated by French and American leads - Sterling Hayden, for instance, is utterly convincing as a Bolognese peasant. And it's not the direction per se, as there are flashes of neorealism and occasional moments of genuine Roman hysteria here, including most of the last hour. But its universal themes, methodical pace and visual style make this movie less an Italian drama than a generically European soap opera. As paean to the land it is Dutch, lit like a Vermeer and composed like a Rembrandt; as political polemic it's Russian, with Gerard Depardieu declaiming Marxism into the camera as if he's standing in front of the Winter Palace; as romance it's French, if anything, though Flaubert's disillusioned housewives were never this bland.
There are many singularities about NOVECENTO. It's certainly the only picture to feature the penises of not merely Depardieu and Robert De Niro but Sterling Hayden; it's probably the last movie to represent cocaine as a harmless diversion; I hope it's the sole film to feature a horse anus massaged until it deposits a load into someone's hands. Most impressively, to my knowledge it's the single movie to capture the whole breadth of Donald Sutherland's talent. He is charming, funny, drunken, sadistic, swaggering, boorish, pathetic, scary, and obsequious. It is a rare film role, and an even rarer supporting turn, that allows an actor so much room; it is an uncommon actor indeed who can fill it.
The same cannot be said of Depardieu's character, who unfortunately has only one face to make in the whole thing, nor De Niro's work, which is as unconvincing here as he was electrifying the same year in TAXI DRIVER. This performance ranks with his most uninspired late 90s shtick. Dominique Sanda, Laura Betti and Alida Valli are outrageously good in their limited roles, as are Hayden, Lancaster and a variety of Italian nationals. But the script wholly degenerates as the film wears on, taking an unhappy turn from pastoral eloquence to symbolist rhetoric. By the end nobody's got anything worth doing except Sutherland, and then he's dead and we've got twenty more minutes of tired verite speechifying.
But it looks absolutely great all the way through. Though his obvious influences are so various and often so pretty, Vittorio Storaro's most striking images here are of things dead and dying: a hat crowned with gigged, squirming frogs; shot ducks twisting and drowning in a canal; a fleeing fascist impaled by farm implements. Not to mention the butchered hogs and raped women and children.