{"id":889276,"date":"2026-09-09T13:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/889276\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:46:10","slug":"joie-de-vivre-review-luca-guadagninos-tribute-to-bernardo-bertolucci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/889276\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Joie de Vivre\u2019 Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Tribute To Bernardo Bertolucci"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOstensibly a tribute to the late Bernardo Bertolucci<\/a> (1941-2018), the one-time giant of Italian cinema whose star has waned somewhat in recent years, Luca Guadagnino<\/a>\u2019s 426-minute docu-essay \u2014 nearly twice as long as Alex Gibney\u2019s Musk \u2014 is the endurance test of this year\u2019s Venice Film Festival. Surprisingly, however, watched in two sittings, it is less of an ordeal than it might appear, partly thanks to the director\u2019s forthright views: from the outset, Guadagnino admits that certain titles in the late maestro\u2019s filmography are just too rubbish to bother with. No Beseiged. No Little Buddha. No Stealing Beauty. Hooray!<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a roundabout quality to Joie de Vivre<\/a> that works best in first half, which is much stronger than the second. Guadagnino\u2019s approach is very personal, snooping around the director\u2019s former home in Rome \u2014 Via\u00a0della Lungara, 3, if you\u2019re planning a pilgrimage \u2014 he seems to be actively trying to summon the late auteur\u2019s ghost. The house is just as Bertolucci left it (and therefore just as his widow, Clare Peploe left it, before she died in the summer of 2021). Somehow, the house still feels alive with his presence, and one wonders if he might come barging into his study at any minute, furiously denying that the DVD copy of Promising Young Woman on display in any way belongs to him.<\/p>\n

\n\tGuadagnino comes at Bertolucci from many angles, even claiming to have fancied him as a younger man, but facts and figures don\u2019t really seem to enter into his concept of biography. Bertolucci just bursts onto the screen, fully formed, with his first \u2018official\u2019 feature film, Before the Revolution (1964). Technically, this was actually his second film after 1962\u2019s The Grim Reaper, but Guadagnino will return to that later. The director, it transpires, has pressganged a lot of his friends and peers to help him out, and to discuss Bertolucci\u2019s first international breakout hit, he wheels out a big gun: Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n

\n\tScorsese was an early convert to Bertolucci\u2019s reinvention of Italian cinema, having caught a screening of Before the Revolution at the New York Film Festival. \u201cThe new voice had arrived,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I was there.\u201d Scorsese leads an impressive cavalcade of directors that are as perceptive as they are surprising: Catherine Breillat, Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, David Cronenberg, Abderrahmane Sissako and\u2026 wait a minute, is that James Gray<\/a>? (It is.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGuadagnino\u2019s next stop is The Conformist (1970) swiftly followed by Last Tango in Paris (1972), the one-two punch that set him up as a major player in world cinema. The former made him an arthouse deity, the second brought him notoriety and very nearly jail time. At this point, Guadagnino drafts in friends from the other side of the divide \u2014 critics and media commentators such as Jay Weissberg, Scott Foundas, Murielle Joudet, Oyku Sofuoglu and\u2026 wait a minute, is that \u201ccontrarian analyst\u201d Armond White? (It is.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe debate about Last Tango is the chewy center of this otherwise freewheeling production, and this also where the film starts to find its feet. Last Tango is perhaps the perfect film to hold up to the light, since it has accrued many meanings in the half-century since release. Its sexual politics once seemed so liberal, and now they very much do not, a paradox Guadagnino digs into: Has the world changed or have we changed? He also has the director\u2019s back, defending Bertolucci from misguided allegations that the film\u2019s famous butter scene was somehow done for real and improvised without the actress\u2019s knowledge. Nevertheless, there\u2019s a fascinating discussion about the imbalance of power on set, and it\u2019s probably just as well the interval occurs here.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second half begins with Bertolucci\u2019s masterpiece, the self-explanatory 1900 (1976), a period epic featuring, together for the first time, Robert de Niro and Gerard Depardieu. There\u2019s a scene of front-frontal male nudity (or rather there was in the festival cut) that\u2019s still an eye-opener today, and, as special guest star Margot Robbie<\/a> points out, \u201cThe greatest cocaine scene ever\u201d. Which brings us swiftly on to La Luna (1976), the jaw-dropping \u2014 and thus almost impossible to see nowadays \u2014 story about an incestuous mother and her junkie son (\u201cIt approached heroin in a joyfully unexpected way\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tGuadagnino spends a surprising amount of time on Bertolucci\u2019s almost completely uninteresting last film, Me and You (2012), before barging into Jeremy Thomas\u2019s house and talking all over him, as the latter tries to discuss his two films with Bertolucci, The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990). The Dreamers (2003) gets no coverage at all \u2014 even though Bertolucci\u2019s affection for the nouvelle vague is catalogued in the first half \u2014 and Guadagnino ends his film with a forlorn elegy for the past (\u201cThe cinema I grew up with is gone\u201d). Which is true, but then people said that in 1927, when sound arrived.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ostensible subject matter of the film, Bernardo Bertolucci, often gets pushed aside by Guadagnino and co., even while the speakers onscreen complain that Bertolucci was often pushed aside as a filmmaker. (It happens; we know that.) Those digressions are interesting, for sure, but it makes for a frustrating experience; one minute Guadagnino is in Marty\u2019s screening room, bowing at the altar, the next he\u2019s being dragged round a desolate field, talking philosophy by a woman with a very stern expression and even more forbidding hair. Bertolucci was \u201ctaking reality and making it eternal\u201d, says a talking head, in a film that takes reality and, at times, simply makes it seem eternal.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: Joie de Vivre. Notes, Thoughts, Words, Reflections, Faces, And Visions Concerning Bernardo Bertolucci And The Cinephilia Of The 20th Century That No Longer\u00a0Exists\u2019 Review
Festival: Venice (Venice Open \u2013 Out Of Competition)
Director: Luca Guadagnino
World sales: Hanway
Running time: 7 hrs 6 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ostensibly a tribute to the late Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018), the one-time giant of Italian cinema whose star has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":889277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[308395,49,48,75,108971,308396,60229,17831,337],"class_list":["post-889276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-bernardo-bertolucci","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-james-gray","tag-joie-de-vivre","tag-luca-guadagnino","tag-margot-robbie","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}