Novecento, an ambitious project and a magniloquent fresco, is dedicated to the faces and bodies of the Emilian peasants (as we read at the end of the opening credits) and is received coldly in the United States, undermining the international perspective that Bertolucci had shown he appreciated with his previous film; but it is not surprising that such a flamboyant epic is unwelcome in the country of real capitalism. The work is divided and programmed in two acts. In the first act, at the stroke of 1900 on a farm in Emilia, Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), the owner's heir, and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu), the son of peasants, are born: they are childhood friends but the war separates them and upon their return they both find a wife. In the second act, their paths diverge mainly due to contrasting ideological choices: Olmo is an active anti-fascist, Alfredo remains substantially indifferent to historical events; they meet again on April 25, 1945 when the partisans put the owners on trial in the farmhouse. Sometimes excessive and slightly overabundant, Novecento is remembered for some inspired pages: for the vivid description of the Dalcò family, where the figure of the patriarch played by the excellent Sterling Hayden stands out, for the moving portrait of Ada (Dominique Sanda), for the monstrous Attila and Regina (Sutherland and Betti) around whom an archaic and material world revolves: water, blood, seed and earth are mixed in the dense chromatism of Storaro, which evokes the paintings of Antonio Ligabue and Il quarto stato by Pellizza da Volpedo (the film's incipit), giving this political melodrama a clear mythological luminosity. In an intense rural setting, the champions and soldiers of two opposing fronts unfold: the corrupt one of the bourgeois (Christian) and the sincere one of the peasants, “pagans” with suggestive names: Armida, Orso, Turo, Censo, Oreste, Menutto, Guercio, Piede d’Oca, Onorato, Montanaro, Bestione. A return to the origins of the Po Valley, to that country, perhaps dreamed, of heroes and giants, busy competing for the last concrete fragments of History and Truth.
