Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 (Italian title: Novecento ) is an epic, two-part saga that follows two boys, Olmo and Alfredo, who are born on the same day on the same farming estate in 1901. Alfredo is the son and heir of the zamindar family, while Olmo is the grandson of the leader of the peasants who works for Alfredo’s grandfather and father. Despite coming from opposite ends of the social scale, the two boys become friends as they grow up, sharing their adolescence and early adulthood. Bertolucci takes this conceit and creates a masterwork about Italy in the first half of the 20th century, treating the two characters — the wealthy landowner and the socialist peasant — as symbols of their class, twinned, conjoined as rivals forever. Inevitably, as Alfredo (Robert De Niro) takes over the reins of the estate, he comes into conflict with Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) who has no choice but to fight against the exploitation of his class by the landed gentry. Into this age-old dynamic enters Mussolini’s fascism. In the film you can see the weak, debauched Alfredo and his class yield crucial ground to the fascist strongmen who are helping them fight the peasants and workers who they see as the socialist-communist ‘menace’.
Captive to evil
In a film which contains much violence and brutality, one horrible scene stands out in particular, still creating a shudder decades after I first saw it. The fascist Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland) becomes the foreman of Alfredo’s estate and employs every dirty trick against the estate workers including caging them, accusing them of treason against the nation, and murdering them. Even as Attila and his wife Regina (Laura Betti) wreak their worst on the estate, their psychopathic appetites grow out of control. At one point Attila lures the eight-year-old son of one of his fascist cohorts into his cottage and rapes him with Regina’s help. Excited by this, Attila and Regina go into frenzied coitus as the small boy watches in terror. At one point, the boy tries to tiptoe away but Attila notices and grabs him. As Regina laughs crazily, Attila starts to swing the little boy around by his feet, faster and faster, till the boy’s head hits a wooden pillar. As Regina screams, Attila keeps swinging the boy around, smashing his head against the pillar again and again.
Towards the end of the film, on April 25, 1945, the day when Italy is finally liberated from the Italian and German fascists, Attila and Regina are caught by the peasants while they are trying to flee. In an almost mirroring of what happened to Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci (both of whom were caught escaping on the same day and executed), Attila is killed by the peasants while Regina’s hair is chopped off. The liberation and post-liberation scenes are filmed in a stylised way — melodramatic, theatrical. The farmworkers enact their revenge — their grim, summary justice — amidst scenes of great rejoicing, with violins playing and full-throated songs being sung, with the long-buried shamiana of red flags stitched together being unfurled, with the fascist signs on buildings being painted over, with children dancing, and with teenagers flirting while waving their rifles.
This particular trick of history
Despite all the joy and relief, there is still somehow the indelible scar of gross cruelty suffered and the deep, lengthy sorrow endured. As the film winds down to its end, the questions and anxieties rise again, panic and laughter mingling — this particular virulence of oppression has been seen off, but has the core disease really left society? 1900 answers the question in one way. In a much more complex film he made six years earlier, Bertolucci answers the question differently. In The Conformist ( Il Conformista ), the main character is Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an intellectual of sorts, who betrays his leftist professor while in the service of Mussolini’s secret police. At the end of film we again see the destruction of the pomp and grotesquerie of the fascist regime, the streets of Rome lit by fires caused by Allied bombs, but Marcello meets with no fatal justice. He is alive and free to meld with the world that will be reformed after the war.
Human beings have managed to act out similar kinds of depravity across time and cultures. Equally true is the fact that each pralaya-Götterdämmerung that leads to the end of a cruel, corrupt and oppressive regime is a bit different, even while some startling similarities pop up and join hands across history. When looking around at any political or societal situation in which the width and depth of evil seems too daunting to measure, it is good to remember that one day this particular trick of history is bound to end. One of the lessons that Bertolucci lays out for us, in both The Conformist and 1900 , is that it’s a good idea — without any unseemly, premature optimism — to prepare mentally for the day of reckoning and, post-euphoria, the new challenges that day will bring.
