Bertolucci has the reputation of being one of the great intellectuals of European cinema, making films that transpose Stendhal, Borges and Dostoievsky to modern Italy, forever dropping the names of Freud, Marx and Roland Barthes in interviews. In fact his head is full of Verdi and his heart is buried alongside the stars in the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard: and 'La Luna' is a slick conjunction of Italian opera and Warner Brothers woman's weepies of the Crawford-Davis kind. This spongy encounter between movable object and resistible force is stated directly when Joe goes from watching Marilyn Monroe betraying her husband beside the foaming torrents in 'Niagara' straight to the Rome Opera where his mother is grandly emoting beside a fake waterfall as Leonora in a kitschy production of 'Il Trovatore.'

Of course Bertolucci has updated the Hollywood weepie, and he has put in the usual arcane references...