Clayburgh's Double Feature

By Frank Rich

In the kind of double bill any actress would trade her residuals for, Jill Clayburgh, 35, who rose to prominence in Semi-Tough and An Unmarried Woman, stars in two wildly different new films: a dark European drama and a light Hollywood comedy.

Luna

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay by Giuseppe Bertolucci, Clare Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci

When a European director makes a film in English, the result is almost always disaster: Truffaut, Antonioni, Bergman, Visconti, Wertmuller have all come to grief when straying from their mother tongues. But Bertolucci, who once broke down the limits of propriety in Last Tango in Paris, has now crashed through the language barrier as well. With the crucial collaboration of Jill Clayburgh, he has made a movie in English without sacrificing any artistic integrity. Indeed, Luna may be his most controlled and personal film to date.

For the first time Bertolucci has unloaded the ideological baggage that seemed superfluous to The Conformist and Last Tango and overwhelmed 1900. Though the director's true subject has always been erotic passion, he has usually tried to obscure that fact by littering his movies with Marxist and Freudian bromides. There is no such posturing in Luna. Bertolucci deals directly with his real obsessions; his film is a lucid and uninhibited journey to the outer limits of human behavior.

Those limits are defined--quite graphically--as incest, drug addiction and ambisexuality. The practitioners of these diverse sports are Caterina (Clayburgh), a recently widowed American opera star, and her androgynous 15-year-old son Joe (Matthew Barry). During the course of a summer singing tour through Italy, the wealthy mother and the spoiled boy carry on a tortured relationship that might well shock the cast of La Dolce Vita. Obscene screaming matches and violent brawls quickly give way to grueling sequences featuring heroin injection and masturbatory sex. The film's dramatic structure is built around the secrets the characters keep from each other: there is more than one Oedipal affair in Luna.

Why is Bertolucci troubling us with these decadent people? It is not to create a morality play. The director does not ask us to care about his characters or even to judge them; they are only instruments to make us share his vision of the world. As always, Bertolucci owes a lot to Verdi, whose life and work is invoked here even more than in 1900. The director believes that life takes on its fullest meaning when it is lived at the intensely passionate pitch of grand opera. By sheer cinematic force, he seduces us into sharing his perverse, voluptuous sensibility.

Luna's images are so hypnotic, erotic and beautifully shot (by Vittorio Storaro) that we enter the movie's unpleasant milieu easily and remain captivated throughout. While the film is full of golden Parma landscapes, the dominant visual fixture is the moon: it is the film's metaphor for characters whose mysterious dark sides only gradually reveal themselves. In Bertolucci's brilliant climax, set at an open-air opera rehearsal, his artis tic conceits all converge. As the camera constantly shifts its point of view, we see that Luna 's events form a different drama--or opera--from each player's perspective. Only the moon, hovering above, can know the total picture.

Clayburgh's Caterina is as changeable as the film demands--by turns silly, head strong, pathetic, psychotic, loving and sexy. Hers is not a likable character, any more than Luna is a likable movie. But affection is always a matter of taste. Taken on their own difficult and demanding terms, both the film and its star are perfect.

STARTING OVER

Directed by Alan J. Pakula

Screenplay by James L. Brooks

Starting Over is a perfectly charming movie, but sometimes charm is just not enough. When a band of Hollywood's cleverest talents make a comedy about divorce, one wants the wit of Annie Hall or the angst of Petulia or at least the winning sentimentality of An Unmarried Woman. Though this film has funny lines and a potentially explosive story, it rarely generates any emotion beyond bland good cheer. Right up to the moment that Starting Over is over, we are still waiting for the fireworks to start.

The movie is the creation of a first-rate director, Alan J. Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men), and television's best comedy writer, James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi). Their premise is sassy: Starting Over is An Unmarried Woman in reverse, with Jill Clayburgh playing the Alan Bates role. This time around, the protagonist is a recently unmarried man, Phil (Burt Reynolds), who continues to pine for his ex-wife (Candice Bergen) even as he woos a new flame (Clayburgh). While Phil bounces back and forth between his two loves, Starting Over seeks to dramatize the hostility, hurt and panic of both men and women who have been wounded in wedlock.

The early scenes are quite promising. When the hero moves to his new playboy digs, his hapless attempts to rekindle the gung-ho spirit of bachelorhood are so grimly dutiful that they seem almost tragic. Phil's first post-separation dinner with his brother and sister-in-law (Charles Durning and Frances Sternhagen) is a riotous demonstration of how overly empathic relatives can send a depressed divorce victim crashing to rock bottom. It is when Reynolds and Clayburgh get together that the movie begins to meander. Starting Over soon becomes a chain of arbitrary and repetitive scenes that show Phil alternately breaking up and reconciling with the two heroines. Though the film spins its wheels mightily--and at times amusingly--its characters and themes cease to move forward.

Everyone involved contributes to the second-half blurriness. Writer Brooks runs out of narrative steam as soon as the movie goes beyond the length of an hour TV episode; he also lets his initially crisp characters trail off into vagueness. Director Pakula, usually a precise stylist, forsakes the film's up tempo and takes to staging comic sequences (notably those featuring a men's consciousness-raising group) in the solemn manner of Ingmar Bergman. The confusion of tone is compounded by Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman's frequent collaborator, who here contributes the murkiest camerawork of his career.

The actors are left in the lurch. It is a fine notion to cast Reynolds against type as a sensitive, sexually unaggressive man, but his performance is cheerless to a fault.

Clayburgh's character is such a bundle of ill-defined contradictions that she takes uneasy refuge in Diane Keaton's Annie Hall mannerisms. She and Reynolds are both too pallid to re-create the heady sexual chemistry of Semi-Tough. Thanks to a sharply drawn role, Bergen fares better: the ex-wife is a latent songwriter whose banal pop anthems to feminism un intentionally satirize the excesses of the Me decade. When the glamorous Bergen shrieks one of her well-meaning but ludicrous hit songs, we can see just how sad, painful and funny this incorrigibly mild movie might have been.

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