If you’re gonna make your first pilgrimage to a world famous theater, go big or go home. That’s certainly what I did today during my inaugural visit to The Quad. The movie? Bernardo Bertolucci’s 5 1/2 hour Communist epic 1900 (1976). And on 35mm, no less! Afterwards I felt like somebody with long, sudsy fingers had massaged my brain folds. Epic, sprawling, and rarely uninteresting, the film is a masterclass in political agitation and swirling emotion. I thought I had seen all of Robert De Niro's great performances, but this film showed me how wrong I was. I'll never be able to look at Donald Sutherland the same way again. His fascist character should be studied as a model for great villains. My only complaint is that the domestic scenes involving De Niro and his alcoholic wife seemed a little out of place considering the political bent of the film. Yes, yes, they demonstrate how even with his bourgeois creature comforts De Niro's landlord still lives an empty, unfulfilled life. Didn't stop me from literally almost falling asleep during them. For such a long-winded movie, there are shots and images that feel burned into my mind with their immediacy and beauty: an unfurled Communist flag made from a patchwork of other hidden flags; two small boys laying on railroad tracks as trains whiz by above them; a cruel fascist getting pelted with an avalanche of sh!t; a peasant child wearing a hat of captured frogs.
9/10
0 Yorumlar