Word: incest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WANT to understand incest, wait for a re-run of Lolita. While Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece doesn't deal with technical incest, a sexual liason involving blood relatives, Lolita does capture that strange and tormented allure which a child can hold over an adult. The first, wonderful, utterly perverse shot of Lolita's toes contains more suppressed eroticism than all of Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna...
Judging from the grotesquely baroque poster and the huge press hype, however, Luna should shock and titillate its jaded audiences with graphic sex and perverted emotions. A film about incest should fascinate, challenge or perhaps disgust its viewers...
Bertolucci makes incest deadly by simply skirting the whole issue for most of the film. Caterina (Jill Clayburgh) is an American diva with an obnoxious, teen-aged son (Matthew Barry) and a pathetic, ancient husband who's efficiently knocked off in the opening sequence. Dad dead, it's off to sunny Italy for Caterina and Joey. The obligatory opening night sequence is filled with lots of American extras running about trying to look Italian by wildly gesticulating and screaming 'Brava, Brava.' Bertolucci also drags out an antiquated collection of cliches about opera and its fans. His women parade about...
...rush hour? The other "big" scene has mom writhing about fully clothed, displaying to full advantage a mere pair of skinny legs. No sexual tension or even desire ever builds up between the two. The two moments of sexual activity occur for no apparent reason; Bertolucci never integrates this incest into the broader context of film. The only truly startling moment in the film occurs when Joey plunges a for into his arm. That's shocking. The single men who came with hats over their laps were sorely disappointed; Luna is not soft-core porn for the artsy...
...distinctly anti-abortion, the result of an extremely well-organized and funded "Pro-life" movement (which some link to the New Right). On the federal level, the 1976-7 Hyde Amendment, a rider on the Labor-HEW appropriations bill, cut off federally funded abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and "medically necessary" instances, defined by the Supreme Court as long-lasting physical or psychological damage to the mother's health...