La Luna (1979 film)

Plot

Joe (Matthew Barry) is the son of famous opera singer Caterina Silveri (Jill Clayburgh). While Joe believes that Caterina's husband, Douglas Winter (Fred Gwynne), is his biological father, the truth is that he was sired by Caterina's former lover, who is now living in Italy and working as a schoolteacher. Joe is moody and rebellious and needs a strong father figure to guide him and keep him in line, but Douglas is ineffectual and emotionally weak, and when Joe witnesses the sudden death of Douglas, it sends him over the edge. In hopes of boosting her singing career, which has fallen into a rut, Caterina decides to move to Italy with her son. There, Joe falls in with a dangerous crowd and becomes addicted to heroin.

Caterina is heartbroken and hopes to lure her son back to a safer and more healthful lifestyle. She tries in many instances to get closer emotionally to her son hoping that increased contact will prevail over the pull of the drugs. She even contacts his drug dealer to ask for sympathy for her situation. At one point, when Joe is desperate for a fix, his mother masturbates him just to get his mind off drugs temporarily.

Seeing no other alternative, she decides to drive to the location they originally lived, where her estranged lover lives with the hope that some sort of fatherly bond will cure her son. Along the way, tensions, some sexual, derail and prolong the trip. Eventually the son is dropped off at the ex's home, but Joe, rather than telling his father that he is his son, says that he is instead a friend of his son, and that his son overdosed on heroin after lifelong turmoil over the absence of his biological father. With some sort of closure achieved for the boy, he returns to his mother who is preparing for an opera. Embracing, they reaffirm their love for each other, and together the son and his father, who has come to watch the performance, and who now knows Joe's true identity as his child, hear Caterina sing at her very best.

Cast

Reception

In his review, awarding two stars, critic Roger Ebert commented on Bertolucci's work, stating, "He has merged a soap opera with a Freudian case history (which are traditionally at odds) and forced them into a union."

In the London Review of Books Angela Carter wrote of Jill Clayburgh's performance "Jill Clayburgh, seizing by the throat the opportunity of working with a great European director, gives a bravura performance: she is like the life force in person".

In an entry dated 7 September 1979, Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his diary "Saw Bertolucci's La luna. Monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish."