vwild The Conformist is very stylish in the way that fashion advertising or New Romantic music videos are stylish. It's self-consciously stylish. Dominique Sanda walks along a corridor and strikes a scornful pose in the doorway of a room like someone parading on the catwalk. Jean-Louis Trintignant walks along the pavement in front of an art deco building as the camera tracks with him in a wintry twilight. At the corner he stops, turns, gestures. A vintage car rolls up. So chic. The acting is stylish. It has that operatic largeness that we get in Visconti's later films. You can see the actors' performances from the balcony. At first all this attention to style is beguiling. There is a strange scene in an insane asylum filmed in the EUR complex. It looks oppressive and futuristic and dream-like, like a scene from 8 ½, but it becomes apparent that all this attention to style has no meaning. It is style for styles sake. At the end of one scene a shot is stitched on of autumnal leaves blown ominously along. What could it mean? Is it the "Wind of Change"? No, it's just leaves whisked about for visual pleasure. Who are we to scorn visual pleasures you may say, but the problem is that, at its worst, the visual pleasures begin to lead the action. The viewer begins to sense that a beautiful image was visualised and then a scene written to incorporate it. The characters' motivation is apparently to complete compositions or visual effects. Unfortunately for the viewer The Conformist is not content with stylish shallowness and tries to achieve depth or insight with what turns out to be a Freudian kitsch. There is a veritable cesspool of confusing childhood sexual experiences giving rise to bizarre adult behaviours. Fascism itself is some kind of psycho-sexual fantasy. It's all so very chic and depraved. Sadly we don't so much witness character development as a bunch of ids bumping against each other. It makes for tiresome viewing and tells us nothing about the psychology of Fascism or anything else that might give the film purpose. The Conformist looks good, sometimes thrillingly so, but it is weighed down by its rather dated psycho-sexual approach to character. The story suffers worst of all, being completely squeezed out by these other dominant elements.

julietbooth-61428 Bertolucci is my favorite director but I knew him mostly with romances. And now this movie totally blew my mind: I have to say that this is This is Bertolucci's one of the greatest works. He really went too serious lately. This movie shows him as fully developed director in both visual and metaphoric way to tell the story. The movie is an amazing work in all means of cinematography. The ending on fascism and homosexuality is certainly proof of a talented filmmaker.I was lucky enough to watch this film in a theater several weeks later after released. If you have the chance, don't miss the chance to see it on a big screen.

jackasstrange Flawless masterpiece. A very engaging, weird and entertaining film. The atmosphere, the cinematography(the use of lights and shadows is jaw dropping), everything is freaking great. The cinematography is really fascinating, we can see the baroque inspiration in some shots. Those who love cinema will love this film. Anyway, is a quite unique film,there are few twists(I thought he would risk his life to help the women in the ambush, since he apparently liked her). I've never seen a film where we actually follow(and even root for) a protagonist that is a fascist. And is very interesting from a psychological viewpoint.Anyway, masterpiece.

lasttimeisaw 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 homosexuality 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!