Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernardo Bertolucci

Ambiguity, in Bertolucci's hands, isn't a coy trick; it's a moral position. "I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is" reads like a director refusing the audience's favorite drug: closure. Mainstream storytelling trains us to treat endings as verdicts - the couple reunites, the villain pays, the lesson lands. Bertolucci’s cinema, from The Conformist to Last Tango in Paris to The Dreamers, keeps insisting that people rarely get verdicts. They get consequences, contradictions, and the uneasy feeling that history keeps moving even when you want the screen to fade to black.

The intent is twofold. Formally, ambiguity protects complexity: it lets characters remain human rather than converted into symbols at the finish line. Politically, it pushes back against narratives that pretend to "solve" desire, ideology, or trauma. Bertolucci came of age with postwar Italy, Marxist debates, and the aftershocks of 1968 - a world where certainties collapsed in public. An unambiguous ending can feel like propaganda: a clean moral that flatters the viewer into believing they stand outside the mess.

The subtext is also a challenge: if life is ambiguous, then your interpretation is not optional. You have to finish the film yourself, and in doing so you reveal what you want the ending to be. Bertolucci’s ambiguity becomes an X-ray of the audience’s politics and longing, exposing our appetite for certainty as another kind of conformity.