The conformist bertolucci. Why Bertolucci's The Conformist deserves a place in cinema history 2019-01-29

The Conformist (1970)

But the young chauffeur has ulterior motives; one day while showing the young Marcello a pistol, he tries to seduce the young boy into a homosexual tryst. The son of well-known poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci, he himself won an award for poetry at age 21, then decided to become a filmmaker. Marcello publicly denounces Lino as a homosexual, Fascist, and for participating in the murder of Professor Quadri and his wife. Trintignant, who has quietly come to be the kev French actor that so many others such as Belmondo were expected to be, digs into the charac­ter of the intelligent coward who sacrifices everything he cares about be­cause he wants the safety of normality. But 10 years later, in 1987, he came roaring back in the U. On a deserted woodland road Fascist agents conspire to stop Quadri's car with a false accident scene. When he accepts an assignment to kill Quadri, a leftist professor currently exiled in Paris, he is forced to confront his own ambivalence.

Margot Metroland, Bertolucci and The

The ef­fect may be to destroy the most gifted filmmakers who are also—not alto­gether coincidentally—mostly left unless the young left develops some tolerance for what the pleasures of art can mean to people. Traumatized by his crime and by his budding sexual desires, he ran straight into the arms of Italian fascism and into his hollow marriage with Giulia, all of which he hoped will give him the appearance of normalcy he seeks. In that last scene, he understands why he became a fascist — even the worst fascist of all — because he wanted to hide and forget what he feels are his differences in his deep, deep consciousness. He watches impassively through the car window as some Fascist henchmen kill the Professor and his wife in the snowy hills of Savoie. Most obituaries and film columns remembered him for that, and his Oscar-sweep for The Last Emperor in 1987. Visconti in The Damned was somewhere in the middle—composing, all right, but in a single, high-pitched scale, as if the music were to be howled by wolves.

The Complicated Legacy of Bernardo Bertolucci

When he attempts to help an apparently stricken driver he is attacked and stabbed to death by several men who appear from the woods. Except for the unconvincing and poorly staged concluding sequence, the flaws in The Con­formist are niggling. Even though Marcello has warned Anna not to go to the country with her husband and has apparently persuaded her that she should leave her husband and stay with him she does make the car journey. Here Bertolucci juxtaposes no less than three layers of time: the day of the assassination, Marcello's confession just before his marriage, and the childhood episode with Lino. Bertolucci has been working on a big scale since his first films— La Commare Secca, made when he was twenty, and Before the Revolution, a modern story derived from The Charterhouse of Parma, made when he was twenty-two—and his films just seem to flow, as if the life he photographs had not been set up for the cam­era but were all there and he were moving in and out of it at will. The political assassination in the forest—an operatic love-death—is the emotional climax of the film; Trintignant sits in his car, impotent—paralyzed by conflicting impulses— while the woman he loves is murdered. His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome at 7 a.

Why Bertolucci's The Conformist deserves a place in cinema history

Bertolucci draws heavily on German Expressionism, with its exaggerated, distorted shapes, and the deep, heavy shadows and stark contrasts of film noir. Related Born March 16, 1941, into a wealthy family in the northern Italian city of Parma, Bertolucci was a prodigious talent from a young age. The film was influential on other filmmakers: the image of blowing leaves in The Conformist, for example, influenced a very similar scene in 1974 by. The issue highlights the use of architecture in the film, pointing out that in order to understand the film itself, it's essential to understand the history of the in Rome and its deep ties with fascism. He agrees, and in confession admits to the priest to having committed many , including his experience with Lino, the consequent , premarital sex, and his absence of guilt for these sins. He shows a streak of bravura en­joyment as he watches himself acting normal. Bertolucci explained he wanted to film this moment to be reminiscent of the murder of Julius Caesar.

Why Bertolucci's The Conformist deserves a place in cinema history

His first Italian-language film in 23 years, the movie centers on a teenage boy who connects with his heroin-addicted older half-sister. But even when he operated within the studio system, Bertolucci always managed to make films that were considered projections of his inner world. Had the government concentrated more on governing instead of killing outspoken critics of the ruling class, the government might have lasted, but fascism is about fear and no country or government can ever last on the ideology of fear. An example, from : A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident. But movies—the great sensual medium—are still stuck with the idea that sensuality is decadent.

The Conformist

To carry out his mission, he decides to take his new wife Giulia to Paris to visit his former teacher, where he uses the excuse to get closer to his former professor, Quadri, and his beautiful young wife, Anna. The materials archived, stored, and presented here, are copyrighted by their respective contributors, and may not be saved, re-transmitted, republished, or reformatted by any means, electronic or mechanical. Marcello makes such a big scene that his former chauffeur runs away, and Marcello realizes that one event from his childhood — the sexual advance from the chauffeur and the shooting — was responsible for creating the soulless monster that he become. Other significant films on which he worked include Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice 1971 , Paul Schrader's Cat People 1982 and Barry Levinson's Toys 1992 , which received another Academy Award nomination for Best Art Direction. The old puritanism imposed on moviemakers is now compounded by the puritanism of the left which coerces filmmakers into a basically hypocrit­ical position: they begin to deny the very feelings that brought them to mov­ies in the first place. The New York Times, film review, September 19, 1970. The movie screened at the Venice Film Festival.

The Conformist ( Il Conformista ) Theatrical Trailer by Bernardo Bertolucci

There's a scene in the woods, with sunlight streaming between trees, that's breathtaking to behold — and all the more stunning because of the brutal events that take place before this background. . American movies have now reached just about the place the American theatre did a decade or so back, when, except for the rare big hits, it had dwindled into a medium for the few. He is called by Italo, his blind friend and former Fascist, and asked to meet on the streets. Even though Marcello and his wife now have a young child, Bertolucci wants the audience to know even though Marcello has accomplished his goal of conforming, his soul is now resting in a darker place because of it. Once again, Marcello is conforming; this time he portrays himself as being anti-fascist. On his honeymoon, he uses this marriage as a cover as he attempts to assassinate a former professor from his college days for the fascist powers that be.

The Conformist

The usual Bertolucci technique is to have characters discover each other, talk or kiss or fight; and let a story unfold from there. Marcello admits he thinks little of his new wife but craves the normality that a traditional marriage with children will bring. Marcello begs Anna not to travel with her husband and to stay in Paris with him; you even get the impression that Marcello wants to run away with Anna, abandoning his own wife, because Marcello sees a kindred spirit in Anna — they both appear to be survivors and she is a woman Marcello could truly fall in love with. These issues become central when one considers a Bertolucci film, because his feeling for the sensuous surfaces of life suggests the revelatory abandon of the Russian film poet Dovzhenko. Some of the bad translations in the original release were comical. No millimeter of the screen is left unpregnant at any moment, no shot is spared heavy meaning.