Bertoluci's film is often abundantly gorgeous to look at, but while that may be the case, it doesn't keep us interested enough in the protagonist's development or the plight of the film itself.
His early films were often too 'artistic' to be taken seriously, and his pretentiousness is quite evident here; he borrowed soundly from Godard and it shows with the excess wearisomeness.
The plot concerns a young man named Athos Magnani who visits a small village in Italy where his father was reputedly an "anti-fascist freedom fighter" in 1936, but from the flashbacks, he was a pompous jerk who really didn't do much anti-fascist work.
In one scene of a dance in the village, Athos' father is smoking his cigarette in defiance of the fascist thugs who are giving him vicious looks. It all seems so silly and mundane, like a challenge that never surfaces.
His father was 'supposedly' murdered by the fascists, and in the present is considered a hero, with the whole bit of martyrdom being evident in the erected statue that bears a striking resemblance to Athos.
So steps in his son, in search of what his father once was.
The town does not want to return to the past, they have heroes today for a reason, and they hesitate to unravel anything about that long ago era.
Bertolucci manages to bore us while piecing useless confabulations from the people who knew his father, including the mistress and three close chums, who are played by the old actors in the flashbacks, and thus Bertolucci plays with the contextual memory of the plot.
Athos is a character who seems pained, and thus reducing our sympathy of him to distaste and animosity. I wanted to grab him and slap him a few times, he was such a pathetic chump.
Is Athos his father, or did his father ever exist? What we have in the end is an erection of exorbitant delineations that don't really matter at all to us.
Bertolucci could have made a wonderful film that rivals some of the great directors of the time, but somewhere along the line, everything didn't get aggregated like it should have; what we have instead is an egotistical exercise in excess that is only ideal to a half-drowsy art student.
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