Joe is the son of famous opera singer Caterina Silveri. While he believes that Caterina's husband, Douglas Winter, is his biological father, the truth is that Joe was sired by Caterina's former lover, who is now living in Italy and working as a schoolteacher. Joe, moody and spoiled, needs a strong father figure to guide and discipline him, but Douglas is aloof and largely indifferent to parenting. When Joe witnesses the sudden death of Douglas in New York City, it leaves him angry and distraught. Caterina, unwilling to continue residing in Manhattan after Douglas' death, decides to move to Italy with her son. There, Joe begins associating with a dangerous crowd and becomes addicted to heroin. Caterina is heartbroken and hopes to lure her son back to a safer and more healthful lifestyle. She tries in many instances to get closer emotionally to her son hoping that increased contact will prevail over the allure of the drugs. She even contacts his drug dealer to ask for sympathy for her situation. At one point, when Joe is desperate for a fix, his mother masturbates him just to get his mind off drugs temporarily. Seeing no other alternative, she decides to drive to the location they originally lived, where her estranged lover lives with the hope that some sort of fatherly bond will cure her son. Along the way, tensions, some sexual, derail and prolong the trip. Eventually the son is dropped off at the ex's home, but Joe, rather than telling his father that he is his son, says that he is instead a friend of his son, and that his son overdosed on heroin after lifelong turmoil over the absence of his biological father. With some sort of closure achieved for the boy, he returns to his mother, who is preparing for an opera. Embracing, they reaffirm their love for each other, and together the son and his father, who has come to watch the performance, and who now knows Joe's true identity as his child, hear Caterina sing at her very best.
Cast
Jill Clayburgh – Caterina Silveri
Matthew Barry – Joe Silveri
Veronica Lazar – Marina
Tomas Milian – Giuseppe
Renato Salvatori – Communist
Fred Gwynne – Douglas Winter
Alida Valli – Giuseppe's Mother
Elisabetta Campeti – Arianna
Franco Citti – Man in Bar
Roberto Benigni – Upholsterer
Carlo Verdone – Director of Caracalla
Peter Eyre – Edward
Reception
In his two-star review, the critic Roger Ebert wrote of Bertolucci "He's got a soap opera and a Freudian case history and he's forcing them to copulate". In the London Review of Books, Angela Carter wrote of Jill Clayburgh's performance "Jill Clayburgh, seizing by the throat the opportunity of working with a great European director, gives a bravura performance: she is like the life force in person". In an entry dated 7 September 1979, Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his diary, "Saw Bertolucci's La luna. Monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish." The movie was banned in Ecuador in 1980 by Abdalá Bucaram, then police intendent.
