1900

Buoyed by the international success of Last Tango In Paris, and the financial confidence of studios United Artists, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures, Italian director Bertolucci took on the epic task of distilling half a century's worth of turbulent Italian social history into just one film. The result is an epic five hour odyssey, constructed in two parts, which caused controversy on release thanks to its extraordinary length, its uncompromising portrayal of sex and violence, and its left-leaning politics.

The film follows the lives of two friends born within a few hours of one another at the cusp of the 20th century, on the same country estate but from very different backgrounds. Alfredo (De Niro) is grandson to the patriarch Alfredo Berlinghieri (Lancaster), and is heir to the estate and all its retainers; the illegitimate Olmo (Depardieu) is grandson to Leo (Hayden), a stoical farmhand whose family has been in bondage to the Berlinghieris for decades. This unorthodox, inter-class friendship is tested by all that life can throw at them: the continued maltreatment of the peasant class, socialist revolutionary uprisings, the rise of Fascism, the fall of the feudal system and the ultimate abandonment of the unjust social status quo in the wake of World War II.

It's an ambitious and wide-ranging vision of a period of intense political and social upheaval, which moves from an affecting account of an intimate and robust friendship, to a broader, if somewhat romanticised, treatise for social change and an all-out indictment of the crimes perpetrated against the peasant class by the upper classes and the bourgeois Fascists.

As a great historical tale of Italian dynastical collapse, it brings to mind The Godfather trilogy and Visconti's The Leopard. Although it shares the visceral violence of the former, it misses out on the subtlety and introspection of the latter. There are also inevitable comparisons with the great social treatise films of early Soviet cinema, Bertolucci's political fervour glimpsed in his celebration of the possibilities of functional socialism, as well as a tendency to oversimplify history and portray its participants as symbols.

Nevertheless it's an involving, if slow-burning story, despite some weak dialogue. The cinematography is painterly and lyrical, but also unflinching in its revelation of gore and brutal sex within the bucolic landscape.

The cast is intriguing. The veteran Burt Lancaster semi-reprises his last-of-the-line patriarch role from The Leopard to great effect. Donald Sutherland is vicious as Attila, the Berlinghieris' foreman and a Fascist henchman. His characterisation is as black as his shirt. He plays a key contrapuntal role to Depardieu's deeply sympathetic, brave (and surprisingly handsome) Marxist farmhand, and for Bertolucci's political message that there are no redeeming features to Fascism of any kind. De Niro floats ambivalently between the two poles unable to engage politically or emotionally with the critical issues of the moment. 1900 is also scored by Ennio Morricone, a work as grandiose and tumultuous as the film itself.