1900

Like a delicious pasta salad, ruined with intermittent slabs of Velveeta cheese. It's the portable Bernardo Bertolucci film, but it's too heavy to lift. The director wanted to make a collective-memory, "popular" film--there's no denying some brilliant, definitive moments in this

left-wing homage to peasant life--if that's your thing. But somewhere Bertolucci got popular culture confused with pulp. Sometimes, this looks like animated Harold Robbins.

1900 captures everything that characterizes the director: his concern with the class dialectic and the battle between Marxism and Fascism, his painterly images of Italy, his historical scope, and his "divided hero" (to borrow a phrase from critic Robin Wood). While it may be a masterpiece at its

original length of 320 minutes, 1900's American, British, and videocassette release is a shortened, somewhat erratic 245-minute version. The plot is about as grand and baroque as one can get, entailing the history of the Italian people and politics in the first half of the 1900s, from the

organization of the peasant class to the rise of socialism to the fall of Fascism. This political dialectic is personified in Bertolucci's two central characters (the "divided hero"), Alfredo (Robert De Niro), born into a bourgeois clan of landowners, and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), born into a

peasant family, who share the same birthday, January 27, 1901 (the day Verdi died, another point of homage). Although they grow up the best of friends, their friendship turns into a love/hate relationship. As an adult, the weak Alfredo is put in charge of his family's property but is merely a

puppet controlled by his evil foreman, Attila (Donald Sutherland), while the Marxist Olmo becomes a leading union organizer. Even in its shortened version, 1900 is an achievement of considerable genius, directed by Bertolucci but made possible by the combined efforts of

collaborator-cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, composer Ennio Morricone, art director Enzo Frigerio, costumer Gitt Magrini, and a phenomenal cast that includes an international Who's Who of performers. But if this were an American work would we be so impressed?