Bernardo Bertolucci has said that the genesis of La Luna lay in a childhood memory of the moon rising behind his mother’s face as she looked at him, a moment at once intimate and unbound, perhaps capable of shaping one’s perceptions for a lifetime, but also sealed off, providing no suggestion of a resulting narrative. Bertolucci’s remarkable extrapolation holds closeness and fracture in grand equilibrium, setting out a mother-teenage son relationship capable of swinging in seconds between transgressive physical closeness (certainly meeting some kind of definition of incest) and melodramatically expressed antipathy, leading to a climax in which a long-broken family is finally made whole again, but in which the physical distance between them is emphasized, and the opera singer mother’s inherent Otherness is symbolized by placing her in the midst of rehearsal, a diva surrounded by dozens of extras. There’s certainly then a pervasive sense of life as display, embodied in Jill Clayburgh’s extravagant performance as Caterina (at once too large a presence, blocking out the light, and yet its only reliable source); but also of corresponding emptiness and loss, trailed early on when her husband worries about a dream he hasn’t had a chance to tell her about, and soon afterwards suddenly dies, and embodied further through various episodes in which Caterina revisits past people or locations of significance. The film is a series of gorgeously imagined physical and thematic spaces, its depiction of warped privilege carrying at least some social charge; it encompasses the painfully stark (the cold details of the son’s drug addiction and its implicit call for self-obliteration) and the happily absurd (near the end, Caterina tells the boy that she broke up with his biological father because he loved his mother too much, her half-laughter suggesting how what was once fraught loses its potency with distance and time).
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