Product Details

• Actors: Jill Clayburgh, Matthew Barry, Veronica Lazar, Renato Salvatori, Fred Gwynne
• Directors: Bernardo Bertolucci
• Format: NTSC, Import, Widescreen, Color
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Amalgama
• Run Time: 142 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001QMGENS
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,334 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Russia released, NTSC (USA and Canada), ALL REGION, WIDESCREEN. AUDIO OPTIONS: Dolby Digital 2.0 ENGLISH (movie is completely in English); DD 2.0 ITALIAN and DD 2.0 RUSSIAN (voice-over). Russian artwork.............................................................. SYNOPSIS: Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial drama explores the troubled life of a young man and his troubling relationship with his parents. Joe (Matthew Barry) is the son of famous opera singer Caterina Silveri (Jill Clayburgh); while Joe believes that Caterina's husband Douglas Winter (Fred Gwynne) is his biological father, the truth is that he was sired by Caterina's former lover, who is now living in Italy and working as a schoolteacher. Joe is moody and rebellious and needs a strong father figure to guide him and keep him in line. But Douglas is ineffectual and emotionally weak, and when Joe witnesses Douglas committing suicide, it sends the young man over the edge. In hopes of boosting her singing career, which has fallen into a rut, Caterina decides to move to Italy, with Joe in tow; Joe falls in with a dangerous crowd and becomes addicted to heroin, while Caterina, hoping to lure her son back to a safer and more healthy lifestyle, tries to become closer to him, which leads to a flirtation with incest. Jill Clayburgh's performance earned her a 1980 Golden Globe nomination.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Minimal Script, Beautiful Cinematography, Qualified Success, May 4, 2010

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: LUNA - by Bernardo Bertolucci (Import) (DVD)

The film begins with a brief but lyrical scene of familial bliss at a mysterious beach house on the Italian coast...but the full meaning of this brief unexplained scene will not be made apparent until the closing moments of the film.

In brief, the story is about egocentric opera singer Catarina Silveri (Jill Clayburgh) whose selfless but neglected husband dies of heart failure in their New York brownstone right before she is to embark on an Italian tour. After his death, she decides to move with her 13 year old son Joe to Italy where she is revered as a star. Catarina lives for the limelight, however this leaves her young son feeling neglected and invisible. In perhaps the most authentically realized scene in the film, Joe briefly unites with a young girl his age and uses heroin for the first time. The drug use is in part a way of dealing with his father's death, his mother's neglect, and his own burgeoning identity/sexuality/familial insecurity. But its not the young girl's love that he wants, its his mother's.

As it turns out both mother and son in this dysfuntional family are suffering from a similar malady (loneliness, nostalgia for a lost happiness/wholeness) and the story is one long journey towards a self-discovery that is actually a return.
But there is really very little story here if by story we mean character development and plot. First off, the story is not told with dialogue (emphasizing the fact that these characters do not communicate), rather it is told primarily with long stretches of suggestive visuals. The long silent stretches of the film are reminiscent of Antonioni (especially the Antonioni of The Passenger) and are used to similar effect--the characters here as in Antonioni are existentially adrift and the visuals allow us to experience that drift as they do. This strategy is intriguing at times as it allows the reader to soak in one ambiguous character moving through one equally ambiguous setting and situation after another. The cumulative effect of these silent scenes has a power that more conventional film narratives do not. Of course many viewers will argue that these qualities that I am describing as strengths are actually weaknesses and I can understand that. For these viewers the end result of the minimal characterization is that the characters and situations do not come to life as they should and the film therefore fails to captivate and falls flat. However, lovers of experimental film who do not need a conventional plot nor conventionally delineated characters to keep their interest will find plenty to admire. The ending of this film is one of the most perplexing but also most striking and memorable of Bertolucci's endings.

It would be about twenty years before Bertolucci tried this minimalist approach again with Besieged (1998) and that is one of my all-time favorite Bertolucci films. So for me, Luna is the great lost link between the early Bertolucci masterpieces (Before the Revolution, Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900) and the later ones (Last Emperor, Besieged, The Dreamers).

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An overlooked masterpiece., May 10, 2009

By 

Lalo C. Dominguez "lopinguez" (Redondo Beach, CA., USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: LUNA - by Bernardo Bertolucci (Import) (DVD)

La Luna for some reason is not much talked about or remembered, but to me is one of Bernardo Bertolucci's best movies. The subject matter is very strong and risky. (for mature audiences only) But the acting is superb, the directing is superb. A must see.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sui generis, November 8, 2010

By 

Thomas Caron (Shanghai) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: LUNA - by Bernardo Bertolucci (Import) (DVD)

Jill Clayburgh's passing should stand as a reminder that "Luna" is long overdue for an American release on dvd. Ostensibly a story about an opera diva and her borderline incestuous relationship with her young junkie son, the film's real focus wrestles with the question of how an artist who has lost her way can regain her motivation. That's not the sort of subject that sells tickets, and hence the movie was received confusedly by critics and audiences alike. But that is precisely what makes "Luna" a film unlike any other. The dialogue can be a bit clunky, and Matthew Berry is not a particularly skillful actor, but "Luna" is unique for delving into the mystery of why we make art, and for those who care about such things, it's an intensely compelling film. (For years at the top of my dvd wish list, I found a copy in, of all places, a supermarket in Shanghai.)