A world-unto-itself, a hypertrophic fresco that spills over the confines of the celluloid to become a novel, a symphonic poem, a Verdian melodrama. To speak of Bernardo Bertolucci’s "Twentieth Century" is to handle incandescent material, a cinematic monolith whose boundless ambition is matched only by its disarming, at times brutal, visual power. This is not a film one watches, but an experience into which one is plunged; a river of time that sweeps over the spectator for more than five hours, leaving them at the end exhausted, interrogated, perhaps even outraged, but never indifferent. This is cinema becoming History, or rather, attempting the mad, hubristic feat of containing the chaotic flow of History within the rectangle of a screen.

The narrative core is ostensibly simple: the chronicle of an impossible friendship between Olmo Dalcò, a peasant, and Alfredo Berlinghieri, heir to a dynasty of landowners, both born on the same day in 1901 in the Po Valley. But this is merely the slender framework upon which Bertolucci, a Tolstoy armed with a camera, erects his Emilian War and Peace. Their parallel, intertwined lives become a seismograph for the convulsions of half a century of Italian history: the rise of agrarian socialism, the horror of the Great War, the advent of fascism, the Resistance, and the Liberation. Olmo and Alfredo are not just two men; they are archetypes, the two souls of a land both fertile and torn asunder, the servant and the master bound by an umbilical cord of affection and hatred that not even the class struggle can fully sever. Their dynamic transcends textbook Marxism, tapping into a dimension that is almost mythological, biblical: Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, two symbolic brothers born of the same mother, the Earth, who nourishes them, defines them, and ultimately reclaims them.

Visually, the film is an orgy for the eyes, a treatise on cinematic aesthetics co-authored by Bertolucci and his magician of light, Vittorio Storaro. The cinematography does not merely illustrate; it interprets, transfigures, paints. There is an almost physical, textural quality to the painterly summer harvest scenes, where the golden, dusty light evokes the Macchiaioli school and the peasant epics of Pellizza da Volpedo. Autumn and winter, by contrast, are cloaked in ashen fogs and a biting cold that seem to have emerged from a Flemish landscape, heralding the political and moral darkness about to descend upon Italy. Storaro does not illuminate space, he sculpts it, using color as an emotional lexicon: the red of the socialist flags is not just a political symbol, but an explosion of Dionysian vitality, a utopian hope pulsing against the putrescent black of the fascist shirts.

Bertolucci orchestrates this immense material with an operatic sweep. It is no coincidence that the setting is the Emilia of Giuseppe Verdi. The entire structure of the film is a choral melodrama, complete with solo arias (the protagonists’ monologues), duets (the confrontations between Olmo and Alfredo), and imposing crowd scenes that recall the choruses of Nabucco. Ennio Morricone's poignant and majestic score is no simple accompaniment, but a veritable additional character that comments upon, anticipates, and elevates the narrative to a level of almost unbearable pathos. The choice of such a heterogeneous cast—Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, at the peak of their youthful magnetism, alongside giants of classic cinema like Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden and European icons like Dominique Sanda and Alida Valli—helps to create an almost Brechtian alienation effect. Hearing these faces, so deeply rooted in our collective imagination, speak with dubbed Italian voices creates a critical distance that reminds the viewer they are not witnessing a realist document, but a grand and deliberate theatrical representation of History.

The film is not afraid to be unpleasant; on the contrary, it seeks out the grotesque and the sublime with the same ravenous intensity. Its depiction of fascism is perhaps the most striking example. Bertolucci eschews political analysis to focus on its aesthetic and psychopathological phenomenology. The character of Attila, played by a terrifying and almost Luciferian Donald Sutherland, is not a simple party functionary; he is a pure incarnation of sadistic and theatrical Evil, a figure who seems birthed from a nightmare by Hieronymus Bosch or a Shakespearean tragedy. His acts of violence, like the killing of the cat or the massacre of the local gentry, are staged with a cruelty so flaunted and baroque that they become a form of anti-aesthetics, the triumph of the death drive over beauty and life. In this, Bertolucci engages in a remote dialogue with Pasolini's final film, Salò, exploring the abyss where power merges with sexual perversion and the negation of the human.

And yet, alongside the horror, there pulses a telluric vitality, a joyous paganism that erupts in the choral scenes of celebration, in the peasant rituals, in a sexuality that is explicit and at times feral. This is Olmo’s world, a world tied to the cycles of nature, to an ancestral wisdom that precedes and will outlive every ideology. The utopian spirit that pervades the film’s second half, culminating in the almost oneiric catharsis of the Liberation, should not be read as a naive political manifesto. It is, rather, the dream of an impossible reconciliation, the desire for a "year zero" in which the accounts with History can finally be settled. The famous and controversial final scene, with the two elderly protagonists still struggling clumsily on the train tracks, is the perfect closing of this circle. Bertolucci is telling us that the conflict is not over, that the dialectic between servant and master, between Olmo and Alfredo, is perhaps the eternal engine of History itself—a drama destined to be repeated, with different masks and costumes, for as long as humanity exists.

"Twentieth Century" is an immense, uneven work, at times naive in its ideological fervor, yet it possesses the grandeur of mad and impossible projects. It is a monstrous and magnificent cathedral, a film that contains multitudes, like a poem by Walt Whitman. It attempts to grasp the ungraspable, to give a face and a body to the Twentieth century, with its hopes, its massacres, its failed utopias, and its unquenchable thirst for life. It is not a perfect film, and perhaps for that very reason it is a masterpiece. Its perfection lies in its own glorious imperfection, in the audacity of a director who dared to think that cinema could not only recount the world, but contain it.