X
- 1970
- R
- 1 h 53 m
- 1970
- R
- 1 h 53 m
Summary Set in Rome in the 1930s, this re-release of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 breakthrough feature stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a Mussolini operative sent to Paris to locate and eliminate an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came to power.
Directed By: Bernardo Bertolucci
Written By: Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci
- 1970
- R
- 1 h 53 m
- 1970
- R
- 1 h 53 m
The Conformist
100
7.3
Where to Watch
Summary Set in Rome in the 1930s, this re-release of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 breakthrough feature stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a Mussolini operative sent to Paris to locate and eliminate an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came to power.
Directed By: Bernardo Bertolucci
Written By: Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 11 Critic Reviews
100
100% Positive
11 Reviews
11 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 11 Critic Reviews
100
100% Positive
11 Reviews
11 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Thirty-five years since its debut, The Conformist is still a stunning, challenging, transporting film.
The Conformist is a great film, drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 92 User Ratings
7.3
76% Positive
70 Ratings
70 Ratings
11% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
13% Negative
12 Ratings
12 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 92 User Ratings
7.3
76% Positive
70 Ratings
70 Ratings
11% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
13% Negative
12 Ratings
12 Ratings
On a minimal budget and a striking cast, Bertolucci provided sharp, tight, and insightful direction telling details, such as the radio station announcing the precise time as the protagonist rings the doorbell exactly when he said he would - the Conformist. The tension comes when he is required to lure his favourite professor into place to be assassinated. How can he refuse a direct order? His personal values are crushed in the dilemma. Brilliantly, reealingly handled.
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The Conformist is another example of how we take films and make them great. I can't wait to spread the word about this to other people so they can see it.
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Even if it weren't in pristine shape for its current re-release, it would still qualify as one of only a handful of films made in the past 30 years that truly deserve to be called great. (Review of 1994 Release)
Bertolucci's masterpiece--made when he was all of 29--will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion.
The Conformist has a decadent visual beauty about it that's breathtaking. But as striking as Bertolucci's classic looks, there's even more powerful stuff in the storytelling.
One of the great Bertolucci's most acclaimed films...Trintignant gives a legendary performance.
Storaro and Bertolucci have fashioned a visual masterpiece in The Conformist, with some of the best use of light and shadow ever in a motion picture. This isn't just photography, it's art -- powerful, beautiful, and effective. (Review of 1994 Release)
Bertolucci is another wunderkind in the industry, at the age of 30, his fourth feature film, THE CONFORMIST has been proved to be a timeless classic, which I feel privileged to watch it now for the very first time.
Tilting camera angle, impeccable shots paralleling the moving train and zooming in from the external side of the window, sensual hues, cubistic buildings, punctilious light and shade deployment (Professor Quadri, the hunchbacked man being introduced by his silhouette), fluid ballroom dancing sequences, the bleak and cold-hearted manslaughter in a wintry woodland, all emerge as consecutive surprises and gustos along its non-linear narrative.
Marcello (Trintignant), a newly-recruited fascist member in Rome, is assigned for an assassination of his old professor Quadri (Tarascio), who dwells in Paris now with her young wife Anna (Sanda), the film hops back and forth episodically in recounting the newly-wed Marcello’s matrimony life with Giulia (Sandrelli), a petit bourgeois trophy wife; their honeymoon to Paris with a clandestine aim to carry out the task until Marcello compellingly falls for Anna; meanwhile Bertolucci allocates episodes to sort out Marcello’s personal lives, his attachment with his amicable blind friend Italo (Quaglio), his drug-addicted mother (Milly) and lunatic father (Addobbati); but underneath his placid and gentile veneer, lies an unfading quandary, stems from his encounter with a pedophile (Clémenti) in his childhood and his latent **** which pulses him to a perpetual and professed seeking of normalcy.
Trintignant is exceedingly under-appreciated in his sophisticated and self-constrained portrayal of a man put in contradiction with almost anything around him, perfectly tallies with the political message of the film, a stooge, put-upon in order to rectify his own weakness, indiscriminately clutches any straw to obey conformability, while in the end, a sense of loss and disparagement is his own bitter fruit. Sanda and Sandrelli are stunning in their own distinctive beauties, the former is resolute, swinging both ways and emanating the like-a-moth-to-a-flame fatalism; the latter imbues a more traditional feminine allure with little clue about what’s in her husband’s mind.
Also it is noteworthy to give credit to Georges Delerue, who produced a spellbound score underlining the varying tenors of Marcello’s state of mind. THE CONFORMIST is a pièce de résistancer with its idiosyncratic aesthetic charisma to crown Bertolucci as the most important auteur in Italian cinema after his illustrious progenitors!
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Until I watched The Conformist my only experience of Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci was 2003‘s The Dreamers starring Eva Green and Michael Pitt. Needless to say I found The Dreamers an easier watch, not least because the majority of that film is in English. The same cannot be said for The Conformist Bertolucci’s 1970 political drama. Spoken in Italian and French the film focuses on Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a young man starting a career in the Mussolini government. The film centers around Marcello’s mission to assassinate his former University Professor Quardri (Enzo Tarascio) who has fled to France. While this mission provides the essential plot, the film is essentially a character study of Marcello, the Conformist of the title. Through a number of flashbacks, Marcello’s childhood, marriage and his relationship with his parents are explored in detail.
The flashbacks form the first half of the film and while they inform the events that follow the non-liner time frame along with the language barrier can be confusing at times. By exploring certain traumatic incidents in his childhood as well as the strained relationships with his morphine-addicted mother and his mentally ill father, we understand why Mercello is the way he is and why above all he strives to conform to the world around him, socially, politically and sexually.
Mercello’s mission is further complicated by the presence of his new wife Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) who believes that they are traveling to Paris for their honeymoon. The character of Giulia is deliberately irritating and when the Professors young wife (Dominique Sanda) is introduced she provides a huge contrast. The film then goes through a period of a becoming a love-quadrangle of sorts between Mercello, Quardri and their wives while the two men try to figure each other out. This in itself could have provided the basis for an entire film and in the wider context of the running time it feels a little rush.
All the same everything that has gone before makes the climatic scene in the French mountains all the more powerful and we are now so deeply invested into Mercello’s character that he doesn’t need to speak.
In a final dénouement the film flashes forward to the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship and we witness Mercello struggling to come to terms with his past. To reveal more than this would be a spoiler but lets just say the incident with the professor is not the only skeleton in Mercello’s closet.
Your enjoyment of the film to some extent depends on your attitude towards subtitles. To me the only issue with subtitles is that it detracts from the performances, as your focusing on the text rather than the actor speaking. With repeat viewings this becomes less of an issue though and given its depth and complexity The Conformist definitely needs revisiting.
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Good acting performance and cast. The movie sets and the production are also striking. And that's it... Only visual stuff. In my opinion, the movie is overrated, perhaps, because of the stigma post-fascism and ****, still felt in the 70's. By this I mean that a film like this, which casts a harsh critique of fascism, would be easily remarkable at a time when in Europe there were still "scars" of World War II. The message is, nonetheless, very interesting and important to impart. But I do not think this movie deserves the same score of Lawrence of Arabia and The Godfather ... Overrated my friends...
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For me this film was visually impressive and interesting but the narrative was boring, the dialogues and acting mediocre and detached. It wasn't convincing at all. The characters' behavior and decisions seemed strange and incoherent (And I should know, as a psychologist and film lover) and the cuts between scenes didn't make sense to me.
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Like some other reviewers, I was not impressed by the writing and the way the narrative was presented. It felt very disconnected, and sometimes confusing, with rough jumps between scenes, often making characterisation deficient. Perhaps it was a conscious decision aimed to convey Marcello's neurotic state and his need to belong, yet I felt that the camera-work alone did the job pretty well, especially the lighting (e.g. in the scene when we first see Guilia, in a striped dress, with moving light source patterned by the blinds, it reflects Marcello's mixed feelings about her), and the unorthodox angles. Also, I still wander if the narrative is objective, or maybe some of the scenes are Marcello's wishful thinking - while watching, I had a theory that the blue light indicated these, but it didn't quite hold up till the end.
And, next to the ambiguous episodes, there are some annoyingly blatant parts. The metaphor of blind fascists was just too in-your-face. I wont give examples, look them up, there are quite some.
The bit I liked about the plot was the suppressed **** theme, under-stressed but sustained throughout the film with several moments of restrained ****, and the ending. I also liked the general air of the 30s, and the music - the credits song is currently stuck in my head.
I'll quote a fellow reviewer here, who said something i fully agree with: ''A fine movie, but dry and difficult to relate to. I can't imagine many people calling this a favorite. I have a great deal of respect for its craftsmanship, above all, most notably because the filming is beyond gorgeous. ''
Overall, while definitely a 9.5/10 for cinematography, The Conformist suffers from the need of a better and more coherent script. Which makes the movie sometimes very boring, confusing and frustrating. Maybe on a second viewing it might be better.
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Production Company
Mars Film,
Marianne Productions,
Maran Film
Release Date Oct 22, 1970
Duration 1 h 53 m
Rating R
Genres
Tagline Bertolucci's Masterpiece about Sex and Politics [re-release]
Awards
Academy Awards, USA
• 1 Nomination
Golden Globes, USA
• 1 Nomination
National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA
• 2 Wins & 6 Nominations
