← Back to results
Luna
La Luna
1979 142 min Italy, United States of America R 16+
★6.4
Drama
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Trailers
Description
While touring in Italy, a recently-widowed American opera singer has an incestuous relationship with her 15-year-old son to help him overcome his heroin addiction.
Starring
Jill Clayburgh
Actor
Matthew Barry
Actor
Veronica Lazar
Actor
Awards
Golden Globe 1980
— Best Actress (Drama)
Key opinion
Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Luna is a polarizing exploration of an intense, dysfunctional mother-son relationship set against the backdrop of opera and Freudian themes. While many viewers praise its visual beauty and emotional boldness, others criticize the narrative as superficial, unsettling, or failing to meet the standards of the director's more acclaimed works.
| Cinematography | The film features visually stunning cinematography and art direction that effectively capture the moods of its characters and settings. | |
| Theme | The central mother-son relationship, marked by elements of incestuous tension and psychological complexity, is viewed by some as a profound, brave study of love, while others find it merely sensationalist or repulsively executed. | |
| Acting | Performance quality is a major point of contention; some critics laud the raw, painful delivery of the lead actors, while others find the character portrayals artificial or lacking in genuine emotional resonance. | |
| Ending | The narrative structure and ending are highly divisive, with some finding them to be a poetic, life-affirming resolution, while others perceive them as confusing or narratively hollow. | |
| Screenplay | The film's screenplay struggles to maintain a consistent depth, with some viewers finding it an insightful examination of addiction and family dynamics, and others dismissing it as a shallow or disjointed farce. |