At the climactic moment of Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, the film's hero, Fabrizio, confesses he cannot join the revolution because he suffers from "nostalgia for the present"; Paul in Last Tango in Paris closes conversation with: "Everything outside this place is bullshit." This sense of a desperately narrowed world, reduced to near zero both spatially and temporally, is at the heart of Bertolucci's art.

Bertolucci's four major films—Before the Revolution …, The Spider's Stratagem …, The Conformist …, and Last Tango in Paris …—constitute both a moral autobiography and a critique of late capitalist culture, a culture Bertolucci celebrates, rejects, belongs to, and attempts to transcend in the most bourgeois possible way: by art. Each of the four films is focussed on a single male consciousness adrift in an uncentered world, all middle-class, and all—with the exception of Marcello in The Conformist—unattached and unemployed. (p. 807)

The malaise...