‘Joie de Vivre’ Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Obsessive Bertolucci Doc Is a 7-Hour Cinema Paradiso Even More Fascinating for What It Leaves Out

Venice: Guadagnino's epic chronicle of his filmmaking idol wends and wades its way through Bertolucci's complicated career — but where the hell is "The Dreamers"? This fascinating, often exhilarating documentary has plenty to chew on.

Luca Guadagnino returns to the realm of personal filmmaking with the 435-minute Bernardo Bertolucci documentary “Joie de Vivre.” Unexpected for an epic movie about someone else’s life and work, it’s also Guadagnino’s most personal movie to date. That’s even after his profound, Cinecittà-shot “Queer” served as much as a monument to the director’s love of William S. Burroughs as it was to Daniel Craig’s beauty, and as “Call Me by Your Name” remains the filmmaker’s ultimate melancholic valentine to the soul-shaping gay romances that dappled his youth in Palermo.

Guadagnino’s newest documentary after a wave of fiction features since 2020’s Ferragamo portrait “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,” “Joie de Vivre” is a philosophically sprawling, rhapsodic shrine to Bertolucci, the Oscar-winning Italian writer/director who died of lung cancer in 2018, and who made a career out of gorgeous, subversive images and stories that refused audience concessions. At the top of “Joie de Vivre’s” luxuriating seven-hour running time — which justifies most of its minutes — Guadagnino announces that the film is both an ode to a lost form of cinephilia and a plea to win over Gen Z and millennial audiences to Bertolucci’s work.

The “Challengers” director is up against a number of them himself, including that Bertolucci’s legacy among younger viewers is primarily stained by the ugly details of his behind-the-scenes pas de troix with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider on the set of 1971’s sexually explosive “Last Tango in Paris.” “Joie de Vivre” embraces the film’s complex making and its avalanche of suffering on- and off-screen by revisiting in archival detail how Schneider felt “a little raped” by the movie’s infamous butter scene. Film scholar Mark Cousins, one of the talking heads here, admits he can’t forgive Bertolucci for springing on Schneider that the scene would include an unscripted, simulated sexual assault. (“He was 31, and his judgment was fucking shit,” Cousins says.)

Another wrinkle is that “Joie de Vivre,” through all its clips of Bertolucci’s work from his groundbreaking sophomore feature “Before the Revolution” to his last film “Me and You,” opts to omit “The Dreamers” entirely save for a few seconds. If you’re trying to reach Gen Z and you’re not going to touch upon Bertolucci’s NC-17-rated erotic drama from 2003, has your mission been accomplished? It features all kinds of sex and nudity with a trio of insanely hot people (Louis Garrel, Michael Pitt, and Eva Green) reveling and rebelling against oppression while living out their Nouvelle Vague-inspired fantasies in 1968 Paris. For a certain generation of budding cinephiles, this movie was basically porn with an arthouse imprimatur.

Guadagnino might not be such a fan. He certainly isn’t of the Liv Tyler-starring psychosexual drama “Stealing Beauty,” as he explicitly states. Maybe, in the case of “The Dreamers,” he did not want to wander into a Letterboxd-era discourse wrought out of Gen Z’s supposed rejection of onscreen carnality.

Guadagnino does, however, spend a full hour easily on Bertolucci misfires like “La Luna” and “Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,” movies likely as hard to find or stream for unsavvy viewers as they are inaccessible to them aesthetically and emotionally. But Guadagnino is remarkably committed to following his own North Star, the Bertolucci he reveres, and besides this stretch of the film, he’s highly convincing.

That’s particularly with regard to Bertolucci’s 1970 “The Conformist,” whose meld of melancholy and political grandeur filmmaker James Gray waxes wonderfully about. Other filmmaker talking heads include Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuáron, David Cronenberg, Catherine Breillat (who had a small role in “Last Tango”), and Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov, who begs the question: Was Bertolucci gay? He was certainly a bit bisexual, admittedly in love with Marlon Brando during the time of “Last Tango” in ways that now seem more homoerotic than homosocial. (Bertolucci’s wife Clare Peploe isn’t much of a character at all, not that you should necessarily draw conclusions from her absence.)

Surprise guest Margot Robbie gets very excited talking about the cocaine scene in the proto-fascist saga “1900” — a movie where Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu basically fuck each other through another woman — as well as the sequence where Donald Sutherland sexually traumatizes and then brutally kills a child. As Bertolucci’s career was founded on busting taboos (incest, pedophilia, homoeroticism, addiction), Guadagnino preserves and even shows us these now-problematic scenes in all their thorniness.

Early in the documentary, the camera makes its presence known through mirrors and with a conspicuous boom mic, as it glides through Bertolucci’s flat. We don’t always feel Guadagnino beside us as acutely through the rest of the film. Guadagnino admits to being sexually attracted to the director when he was younger. It’s these asides where Italian director Guadagnino’s flamboyant personality is most felt. I would’ve loved his take, however, on Schneider’s comments. But, alas, no. He lets others do the talking.

Gray’s canny opinions about the state of film reviewing, and why we need an elevated discourse, especially as Letterboxd has democratized criticism regardless of your thoughts on the cinephile social platform, are sharp and hilarious. Not all opinions are created equally, he argues. Gray’s opinions about particle accelerators certainly wouldn’t be, he says, so why should some random’s be about the artfulness, or not, of a piece of cinema?

Guadagnino is passionately dazzled and staggered by the scale and pageantry of Bertolucci’s movies throughout, as he wends his way through many conversations, some longer and more unnecessary than others. (He inadvertently sets up a couple of European intellectual scholars to get lost in their own sauce.) The Best Picture-winning “The Last Emperor” as well as “The Sheltering Sky” yield candid commentary from producer Jeremy Thomas and the latter film’s star Debra Winger. She gets dishy with Guadagnino about the backstage shenanigans that seem to follow her onto every set. They followed her and John Malkovich to the Moroccan desert on that 1990 film.

But “Joie de Vivre” ultimately isn’t serving dish. Nor is it a “making-of” documentary either. We have DVD bonus featurettes for that. “If you fall in love with cinema, you’ll never be alone again,” Cousins remarks to Guadagnino at one point over coffee in the Irish documentary-maker’s office. It’s the poetic musings and even the philosophical ramblings of “Joie de Vivre” that make it sing. Sidestepping “The Dreamers” almost entirely may prove to undo Guadagnino’s objective, but its omission emerges as a call to action or at least to a dialogue with “Joie de Vivre.” It’s certainly a choice, but one that encourages you to discover “The Dreamers” for yourself, and then even argue back with Guadagnino about why he left it out. He’s not trolling us. He’s inviting us into the conversation.

Grade: B+

“Joie de Vivre” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.