Bernardo Bertolucci have a fantastic way of making movies. His stories are usually a bit weird but altogether very interesting. This time the story doesn't please me that much.La Luna is a story about the relationship between an opera singer (Jill Clayburgh) and her son (Matthew Barry). The movie is as beautifully filmed as Bertolucci's movies always are but the weird incestical feeling about it does not appeal to me. I just can't find any reason for it. I also think that the heroin addiction is not portrayed very believably.Plus points for the strong European feeling in the movie.

In a way I feel sorry for Bernardo Bertolucci's La Luna, though maybe more for Bertolucci than the film itself. Having come off of the monumental undertaking of 1900, he probably wanted to still keep the challenging creative juices flowing, and in doing so concocted an idea surrounding a mother and son who lose their closest significant other and go to Rome, only to get dragged into their own created mire of drug addiction, self-absorption, and incest. This, of course, sounds quite meaty dramatically, at least when first heard. Executed on film it's another story, and the final script is probably what ends up making the film one of the weakest- if not THE weakest- I've seen from the director yet. This still means that there's good chunks in there, even really wonderfully sordid moments of incredible familial dysfunction between mother and son. But unlike, for example, Malle's Murmur of the Heart, there's a lack of cohesion to any sense of firm psychology with either mother or son, and while things are fascinating and potent in dramatic spontaneity in the first two-thirds, there's a moment when things start to go downhill. By the end, I wondered if Bertolucci was about to break into the end of 8 1/2.We're given a character study, that's for sure, and quite the two f***ed up characters. The mother is Caterina (Jill Clayburgh, a quasi Diane Keaton look-alike, however only sometimes talented and convincing), who's husband (in a great bit part by Fred Gwynne) dies suddenly while driving a car. Though both mother and son are devastated, they go to Rome so she can sing in the opera there. The son, meanwhile, is at that absolutely abhorrent age in anyone's life- 15- and at first is into some nothingness abound with a girl, and soon enough into a dead-end mind-set of heroin. This alarms her mother, to be sure, and perhaps the most perfect scene of the film (whether this means it will shock or unsettle is another matter), is when the son plays piano for a moment when the mother tries to get her son to tell her about his drug problem, peers for a moment under his shirt, and then he erupts at her with physical violence. Finally it ends, and she goes to one side of the room with a look like 'what the hell just happened', and he goes off to do more junk. There's even the brilliant little insinuation, which is all that's needed, of a notion of desire when she's trying to peer at his arm.Now, if there had been more scenes like this, consistently, it might even be one of Bertolucci's masterpieces. But, however, this is not to be. Towards the middle things even become shaky, as the same randomness of mind and spirit with the mother and son, this chronic sense of equal parts of nihilism, despair, gallows humor, and the oddness of bourgeois discontent with dark pasts, becomes something that Bertolucci isn't fully able to grab a hold of. And unlike in Last Tango in Paris, there's no Marlon Brando here to make things incredibly appealing with totally believable dread in the face of loss. Matthew Barry is decent in the part of Joe, the son, but also teeters on being annoying (which maybe is part of the desired effect, but still). And the sense of how their push and pull relationship with his drug addiction as the center isn't fully resolved with the mother. Clayburgh's Caterina just isn't sympathetic, or empathetic, enough to get into her mind-set, because despite being interesting in her part of a somewhat un-fit parent who loves her son perhaps in the worst possible ways, and that both are crazy, it isn't enough to sustain what happens at the 2/3 mark...which is when Bertolucci and his writers pull out the "son, I'll take you back to your roots, and find your *real* father who made you a bastard" card, and everything goes downhill from there.It's a mark of downhill quality that has almost been building, and it's troubling especially since a lot DOES work in morbid detail of the characters, and how operatic intonations somehow become involved in their plights. But Bertolucci tends to put the hammer down in both technique and substance, and only in the former does it really work. His and Vittorio Storaro's eye in this film is just as sharp and succulent as in their other collaborations, with the camera gliding seamlessly in some crucial ways, providing movement to just the slightest moments of emotional upheaval. Yet even in the least effective spot of the film, there are the moments, like when Joe plays drums with his fork and spoon at the table. Or the very awkward silence after the mother's sexual advances go very unheeded. In the end La Luna becomes more worthwhile to see for what doesn't work as opposed to what does. While some might come away from it feeling that it's an uncompromising work of genius, I wouldn't, though it's not a failure either. It's a curious work of bravura testing of the limits of what people- in this case Americans- can be in such a European environment, and that the psychologies therein are as wobbly as a bad table leg.

I always try to see as many European movies as possible. That has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a European myself. It's because I want to keep an open mind on as many kinds of movies as possible. I certainly do not dislike Hollywood movies, but I find the Asian and European movies sometimes more original and stylish. Especially the Italians seem to have a feeling for creating a beautiful, stylish and colorful movie, so when I got the chance to see "La Luna", a movie directed by Bernardo Bertolucci I didn't have to think twice..."La Luna" tells the story of the recently widowed American opera diva Caterina Silveri. She takes her teenage son Joe, who believes that it was his father who died, while in reality it was his stepfather, with her on a long singing tour to Italy. But she is so absorbed by her hectic work schedule that she doesn't pay much attention to him. Soon she discovers that her troubled and lonely son has become a heroin addict and in her attempts to get him of the drugs, they start an incestuous relationship. Still, these problems may also result in a meeting between Joe and his real father, whose existence she has always kept a secret, but now reveals in a desperate attempt to make her son act normal again.I understand that many people will raise an eyebrow after reading this resume, but I guess that's exactly what I mean about keeping an open mind towards as many movies as possible. I'm sure you'll never see such a movie in Hollywood, but that doesn't mean it can't be any good, does it? And yes, perhaps the subject will not appeal to many people, but in my opinion it still is worth giving a try.I've read in other reviews that this may well be the best movie Bertolucci has ever made, better than "The Last Emperor" and "Little Buddah", his more famous movies. I really can't tell you whether they are right or not, because I haven't seen those movies yet, but what I can say is that this is a good movie. The acting and the photography make this movie look better than average and make the disturbing subject bearable to watch. That's why I give this movie a 7/10. It's probably not to everybody's taste, but it certainly isn't bad.

Not quite sure how I exactly feel about this film. As with a lot of Bertolucci movies, there are plenty of cringe-inducing moments, from the overblown Verdi opera scenes to Jill Clayburgh campily dancing around to rock music screeching "Oh yeah! In the 60s we believed in THINGS!!!" Taken as a whole, the movie is very uneven, psychologically muddled, heavy-handed and overlong. But there are haunting stretches in this movie which continue to resonate with me -- an opening passage where Clayburgh is biking in the night with her baby, and even smaller moments like the strangely beautiful shot of the teenagers skateboarding down the streets of Rome, or the kid dancing to "Night Fever". I would love to rewatch it and hope it get released on DVD. It's a fascinating entry in Bertolucci's work. A mess, but I think it's stayed with me more strongly than 1900 or Tango, though I think The Conformist still reigns supreme.