Il conformista
Directed by:
Bernardo BertolucciScreenplay:
Bernardo BertolucciCinematography:
Vittorio StoraroComposer:
Georges DelerueCast:
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Fosco Giachetti, Dominique Sanda, Yvonne Sanson, Carlo Gaddi, Umberto Silvestri (more)VOD (1)
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This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello's mind. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (3)
An excellent political thriller with chilling characters, including the lead role, brilliantly portrayed by the ingenious Jean-Louis Trintignant. It’s a film that is suspenseful, cruel, and psychological, relentlessly striving to get to the heart of the matter, even if it means confronting uncomfortable truths. Who are we? What is our conviction? And how is it possible to change it, if it is possible? Interesting questions come to mind while watching the film.
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The Conformist is a visually gluttonous portrait of a man who escapes viewers as well as himself in a fragmented mosaic of distorted memories, from which he tries to piece together an answer to how he got into his current situation, when for the first time he clearly finds himself at a moral crossroads between his own desires and his voluntary collaboration with the regime. With its non-linear narrative and symbolist images, The Conformist confronts viewers with a complicated labyrinth that is, however, an eloquent depiction of the title character and his inner turmoil, as he tries to conceal his trauma with an absurd effort to be normal.
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I was going for the theme, not at all expecting the visual delights that awaited me. Seeing the Bay-esque camera shots in the 1970s is breathtaking. The lighting and mise-en-scene work, while maddeningly stagey and mannerist in places, is really inventive on the other hand and adds to the importance of each scene. I'm sympathetic to the film's position, in which a man without an ideal is a natural servant of evil, and I'm quite interested in its further development to the current era of late capitalism, where ideas are again commodified, creating a new variant of conformity.
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