I've seen it said ironically that Bertolucci's analyst should really be credited as a co-director for most of his films: their working-through-or simply display-of contradictory and often problematic 'theses' (or perhaps simply feelings) on queer sexuality, masculinity, femininity, love and violence is at once a subject that entwines with narrative unfolding and a kind of immanent texture whose import it seems no one can quite fully grasp. But what does this mean when the film is ostensibly an attempt to depict the history of class struggle in Italy during the first years of the 20th century on a broad canvas? The film's sexual politics seem at once central to its 'argument' about fascism and class struggle-if not in as programmatic a fashion as 'Il Conformista'-and insufficiently connected. In the film's final third, we shift from domestic drama to collective history and to the debates on liberation day as to whether or not Communist partisans should hand over their weapons, bringing the film into the centre of current political debate on the junction faced in the Italian political landscape at the time of the film's making. And then a strange coda, returning to the central relation between the padrone (Robert De Niro) and the peasant (Gérard Depardieu) and, at the same time, a seeming shift into broader allegorical territory, as the aged De Niro/Depardieu pair stagger along by the train tracks, replaying their love/hate relationship from childhood. In the allegorical schema, the scene can be read in a fairly obvious way: because the Communist Party insisted that partisans disarm instead of expropriating landowners, the apparently 'eternal' love/hate conflict and parasitic relationship between padrone and peasant continues ("the padrone is alive"). That's to say, that conflict-which has structured much of the film-has been socially produced, and its continuance, even in the apparently modernised post-war world, is a kind of regression (literally, the world of boys fighting). But so much libidinal investment is placed in that relationship-the life-long romance of the son of a peasant and the son of a padrone-that it seems to exceed such analytical territory. ("Hole in the pocket socialism" indeed...) Likewise, the structural mirroring and doubling-the padrone and the peasant patriarchs (Alfredo/Burt Lancaster and Leo/Sterling Hayden), their sons (Alfredo/Robert De Niro and Olmo/Gérard Depardieu), the socialist lover and the upper-crust bohemian lover (Anita/Stefania Sandrelli and Ada/Dominique Sanda)-establishes a structure of equivalence that emphasizes a kind of inter-class reciprocity and dependence as much as class war, made all the more murky by the libidinal investments. Perhaps this is a 'way in' for the audience-and the critical stratum of the international bourgeoisie; perhaps Bertolucci was more comfortable filming the decadence of the upper classes and bourgeoisie/petit bourgeoisie than the peasants, who come across as noble yet wooden stereotypes. The central questions, half-a-century on, remain hard to answer: what is this film trying to say, and who's it for? It remains visually sumptuous, technically superb in its execution, ambitious and sometimes moving, sprawling and episodic, intensely memorable, perplexing, confusing, excessive in every way.
