Bernardo Bertolucci may be more familiar to modern audiences for his grand epics like The Last Emperor, but in the early 1970s he was a key figure in Europe's art cinema scene. With The Conformist he combined the radical ideas of his mentor Jean-Luc Godard with a more digestible thriller format, gaining instant international acclaim. Although it remains a dense and intellectual exercise, its relatively conventional hit-man plot and sumptuous photography make it an accessible entry point into the politically charged European filmmaking of the era.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Clerici, the titular conformist who's desperate to fit in with the prevailing mood of fascism sweeping 1930s Italy. After joining a paramilitary group he's assigned to assassinate a subversive professor who taught him at college. Combining the execution order with his honeymoon, he takes his new wife to liberal Paris but finds himself haunted by indecision as he falls for the professor's irresistible bohemian wife. Through flashbacks we later realise that Clerici's political views and obsession with convention both derive from a disturbing episode in his childhood that left him repressed and tormented.
"ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT FILMS OF THE 1970S"
With its complex narrative structure and its references to Freudian psychology and left-wing politics, The Conformist is in some ways a demanding film. But visually it is unambiguously beautiful: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography uses darkness and shadows to highlight Clerici's fractured mental state, while Bertolucci entraps his characters within large, empty modernist buildings to convey a sense of fascist menace (surely an influence on Terry Gilliam). A potent mix of sex, psychology, politics and visual extravagance, The Conformist is one of the truly great films of the 1970s that shouldn't be missed on this big-screen re-release.
James Rocarols, BBC Films, Updated 23 February 2008.
The 29-year-old Bernado Bertolucci became a major international director in 1970 with The Conformist, his adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel about the making of an Italian fascist, and it is good to have it back on the big screen in a new print that does justice to Vittorio Scarfiotti's art direction. Jean-Louis Trintignant is magnificent as the weak, middle-class intellectual finding a poisonous role as a fascist man of action in Mussolini's Italy, his life story unfolding during a 1938 assignment to assassinate his former mentor, a liberal living in French exile. The astonishing use of Art Deco and grandiose fascist architecture makes it an expressive spectacle, but the psychology is what Orson Welles called 'dollar-book Freud.'
Philip French, The Observer, 2nd March 2008.
Bernardo Bertolucci's mysterious 1970 classic is now on rerelease at London's BFI Southbank as part of a "European Noir" season, and this is perhaps the most sympathetic context for it. What comes across afresh is Italian cinema's recurrent insistence on finding in fascism a sexual reflex - both cause and effect of sexual dysfunction, guilt and abuse. This approach arguably makes light of history and ideology, but Bertolucci's film has the compelling quality of a bad dream.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Clerici, a well-to-do young man who has become a self-hating homosexual owing to a bizarre attempt at molestation in childhood by the family chauffeur. Concealing this has led him to want to "fit in" at any price, so he joins Mussolini's fascists in the 1920s. On honeymoon with his bride, Guilia (Stefania Sandrelli), he seeks out Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), the supervisor of his doctoral thesis on Plato, who is now an anti-fascist organiser; Clerici has promised his fascist masters to assassinate this man, to prove his loyalty. The influence on The Godfather is clear, but the movie's decadent sexual torpor marks its difference from the striving, blue-collar cinema of Coppola or Scorsese, alongside that patrician-aesthete view of homosexuality as tragic inner wound. Like a sexualised Masque of the Red Death, The Conformist gives us a fervent Sapphic Tango in Paris, between the wives of Clerici and Quadri. Gripping.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 29th February 2008.
What is F-Rated?
The F-Rating is applied to all films which are:
- Directed by women
- Written by women
- Has one or more significant women on screen
If it qualifies with one of the above it gets the Bronze rating.
If it qualifies with two of the above it gets the Silver rating.
If it qualifies with all three of the above it gets the Gold rating.