In a Sight and Sound interview with Richard Roud Bertolucci says he first had the idea for his film La Luna during a session with his psychoanalyst. 'I suddenly realised that I had been talking about my father for seven or eight years - and now I wanted to talk about my mother.' It seems to have taken them an unconscionable time to get around to discussing the person Freud calls a child's 'first seducer', the authentic, original source of love and hunger, but Bertolucci certainly now attacks the subject with brio. He says that, in La Luna, 'I wanted to say the obvious - that every man is in love with his mother.' Which, put like that, is something like dedicating a movie to the proposition that rain is wet. Nevertheless, La Luna is concerned to reveal this psychoanalytic truth via the artistic method of the lushest kind of Forties and Fifties Hollywood melodrama.

LRB 6 March 1980 | PDF Download