After the Electra complex highlighted in Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci returns with The Moon to his favorite myth of Oedipus. Caterina Silveri, a famous soprano, loses her second husband (Fred Gwynne) and moves from New York to Rome with her teenage son Joe. He, neglected by Caterina, is morbidly fond of her, so much so that his most remote and fantastic memory is that of the moon, seen one summer evening behind his mother's face; once she discovers that her son is a drug addict, and tormented by guilt, she begins an incestuous relationship with Joe that is ultimately broken off by the boy's father (Tomas Milian). The film repeats the spatial conflict of Last Tango, between the exteriors - large, bright - and the interiors reserved for the unconscious. The opposition inside/outside corresponds to that night/day. The rotating fan on the ceiling of Joe's room is something that is in the sky, like the disk of the nocturnal star; but it is also inside, as illustrated by the first memory of the protagonist, sitting on the handlebars of the bicycle while his mother pedals in the dark on a road in Sabaudia, right under the moon. That pale bottom of the glass shines up there. High/low, above/below: the moon is a goddess, the mother – assimilated to the moon – becomes an object of worship. Joe loses himself precisely in the search for and conquest of the mother moon, who is an opera singer, a lady of bel canto. The allusions to Bellini and to a famous aria from Norma are so obvious that they hide a trap. That “chaste diva” of melodrama is inaccessible and lost to her son – just as the mother of the Po Valley child in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex is close and yet very distant. The mother’s face guards Joe’s wisdom, just as the moon has archived that of the paladin Orlando. The moon is memory, cinema is memory, therefore the moon represents both cinema and the syncretic, cinematic and intimate memory of the author: just to underline what critics often reproach him for, that is, a certain autobiographical narcissism.
