Left behind Sunset Stories and Bertolucci’s 1900 BY GERALD PEARY

Lucille Alpert, a feisty social worker with degrees from the University of Chicago, pictured her idyllic retirement as lying around a bed with friends bringing her delightful books. Instead, as seen in Sunset Story, Laura Gabbert’s tender, beguiling documentary, which screens this Monday and Tuesday, March 21 and 22, at the Brattle, Lucille ended up, in her 90s, at Sunset Hall, an LA elderly facility for aged left-wing radicals. Here there are free-thinkers’ discussion groups, sing-alongs to a social-worker guitarist’s repertoire of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and a lending library that includes Lenin: The Collected Works. When there’s a protest about town, Sunset Hall packs its willing into a mini-bus, from which they emerge at the demonstration with wheelchairs and walkers.

Unfortunately, many patients at Sunset Hall are in an Alzheimer’s haze that prevents them from knowing whether the revolution has come, or even where they are. Lucille has all her wits, and she’s exasperated by her slow-thinking, slow-moving comrades. The good news is that she has a friend there who’s also sharp-minded, Irja Lloyd, just turning 80, and the bulk of Sunset Story is devoted to their incredible Odd Couple amity: touching, tremendously heart-warming, and often hilariously funny. Lucille is the hard-boiled Jewish pragmatist and skeptic, grumpy and ever-impatient; Irja is a spiritually bent WASP who empathizes with the other patients and is willing to listen to even their most demented tales. "I wish I’d known some of these people 10 or 20 years ago," she says. "I have a feeling about what good people these are, and what good things they’ve done in their lives." One of the two falls mortally ill. I won’t tell you more, but, whatever your age, don’t dare miss this sweet, sweet documentary of humanity and quiet courage. And bring a handkerchief. Maybe two.

WHAT’LL BE THE LENGTH of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, which screens this Monday, March 21, as part of the Coolidge Corner’s tribute to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro? I saw 1900 at the 1977 New York Film Festival, and this Euro-Marxist telling of Italian history from 1900 to 1946 ran four hours and five minutes, trimmed down from its original five-and-half-hour "director’s cut."

"When I finished the movie, I said I couldn’t cut one frame," Bertolucci told me at the time when I interviewed him at his Manhattan hotel. "Later, I saw that the movie could be cut. Instead of a castration, I arrived at an artistic work."

What was deleted? "My friends in Italy couldn’t even tell me. The difference is only in the rhythm. The meaning, the strength, is absolutely the same."

Why did Bertolucci cast Hollywood stars, and also Gérard Depardieu, all pretending to be Italian? "My first idea was to have Americans play the landowners. Burt Lancaster, Robert De Niro. Then I wanted a Russian to play the [main] peasant. Depardieu at least looks like a Russian. I wanted to make a monument to contradiction, a dialectic movie between Hollywood actors and peasants, prose and poetry, money and red flags. For me, Sterling Hayden, an American, can be a partisan peasant. I’m not a purist."

Must Bertolucci’s cast share something of his politics? "I don’t think it’s important. It might be more interesting to have a non-leftist portray a leftist because then I would try to catch the left feeling that is inside everybody. I like to go against the ideas actors have of themselves, to be dialectic."

Whereas Brando’s loins were sheltered in the filmmaker’s Last Tango in Paris (1973), celebrity penises abound in 1900. "I was so attacked by feminist groups because Marlon wasn’t naked," Bertolucci said, having come to agree with those who complained that only Maria Schneider was revealed. "It’s true. There is a sexist connection. You always see the female but not the male. Last Tango had a strange life in Italy. It was seized, banned, and the negative was condemned to be burned." He giggled. "Luckily, we had lots of negatives."

Would he comment on Norman Mailer’s claim that Last Tango cheated because actual penetration never occurred? "Do you mean maybe I was repressed? Sometimes it’s better to indicate than to show. In 1900, you see penetration in the look on Dominique Sanda’s face."

Then quietly, he refuted Mailer’s allegation. "The first time they fucked in the empty apartment," Bertolucci said, weighing his words, "they fucked."

Gerald Peary can be contacted at gpeary@geraldpeary.com