The Marxist Emperor

HE PADRONE IS ALIVE.” ROBERT DE NIRO’S WEALTHY LANDOWNER, SPEAKING in the third person, has been kicked, spat on, and stripped of his title by the celebrating peasant partisans who’ve run the fascists that he tacitly supported out of town, but he gets these defiant, triumphant, and ultimately true last words of Bernardo Bertolucci’s , 317 minutes of magnificent, coruscating filmmaking in its original version. A child of Marx, Freud, and the Holy Trinity, Bertolucci was to a singular degree focused on the figure of the patriarch and the concept of the patriarchy, as found at work in both the individual family and in larger society. It is perhaps fitting then that, fallen out of fashion and in some corners “canceled” due to the recirculation of accounts by the late Maria Schneider of her treatment as a 19-yearold on the set of (1972), Bertolucci has become a very symbol of the dictatorial director-as-patriarch, a figure we’d do