Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Bookmark this pageThe Conformist (1970)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Movie review
From Time Out London
Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white nostalgia.The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero, volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.
Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’ agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici – he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio).
It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone, exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score.
Author: Wally Hammond
Time Out London Issue 1958 Feb 27 – March 4
Cast & crew
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Producer: Maurizio Lodi-Fé
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Taroscio, Pierre Clémenti, Dominique Sanda full cast
Rated: 18
Duration: 108 mins
UK Release: Feb 29 2008
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Time Out's 50 greatest monster movies
As Joe Johnston’s long-awaited reinvention of Universal’s howl-at-the-moon classic ‘The Wolfman’ hits cinemas, Time Out lists our 50 favourite cinematic stalkers, growlers, slashers and biters.
Mark Kermode: A life in film
Dave Calhoun chats to Britain's most outspoken film critic and pundit ahead of the release of his memoirs
Has Ricky Gervais gone all serious?
The trailer to 'Cemetery Junction' suggests that its writer-director is suppressing his funny bone.
The genius of Roman Polanski
Ahead of his new film, 'The Ghost', we must forget the media circus and remember the artist pleads Wally Hammond
Oscars 2010: The nominees
Tom Huddleston offers his acute analysis on the list of nominees for the 2010 Academy Awards
Rotterdam 2010: Geoff Andrew's report
Geoff Andrew finds rich leftfield pickings at the 2010 Rotterdam Film Festival
Can Tom Ford cut it as a director?
After ten years as creative head of Gucci, Tom Ford has directed his first movie. Nina Caplan meets him
Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade
So here it is… Ten years, thousands of movies and millions of dollars in international box office, and it all boils down to this.
2009: The year in film
We look back at the best movies of 2009 and pick out some of our favourite lists, features and interviews.
What do you think?
Post your review now