Recently widowed American opera diva Caterina takes her teenaged son Joe with her on a long singing tour to Italy. Absorbed in her hectic work in various Verdi operas around Rome, Caterina is soon shocked to discover that her troubled and lonely son has become a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to wean the youth off the drug result in an incestuous relationship, but also in a possibility to reunite Joe--maybe even herself--with his real father, whose existence she has kept a secret from him.
That said, "La Luna" is as aesthetically bold as any film Bertolucci has made, with cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and an original score by Ennio Morricone. As cinema, it is lush and appropriately operatic, and its evocative visual images often border on the outright exotic. It's debatable whether or not they correspond to the emotional landscapes of the characters or simply exist independently, but they certainly deepen the already portentous narrative, showering its urgency with a certain sad indifference -- the indifference of gaudy spectacle. The performances by Jill Clayburgh and Matthew Barry as mother and son, respectively, are nothing if not intense, and while both actors often hit wrong and contradictory notes, the film succeeds at illustrating the almost spiritual depth of the intimacy between a mother and her son (established with immense grace by the opening scene), so that when it does become sexual, it is indeed more Oedipal than incestuous -- that is to say, Bertolucci's willingness to shock here is legitimized, at least, by his representation of The Human Condition as Bertolucci sees it. That the film is finally so devoid of insight is the real shocker.
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