“The Conformist is Bernardo Bertolucci’s most acclaimed picture for good reason. It’s a tragic tale of a tortured soul, an Italian fascist with whom most of us wouldn’t particularly want to sympathize. Yet the story is fascinating because his human frailties are ours. It is about Marcello Clerici, a casually cruel man in his mid-30s who is enlisted by the Italian fascist government to assassinate his former teacher, Professor Quadri, an anti-fascist activist in 1938 France. Haunted by a childhood trauma, Marcello seeks normalcy in his marriage to Giulia, whose ordinariness is what he seeks yet also disdains. Then he falls in love with Quadri’s wife, Anna.
“On an initial viewing, The Conformist can be challenging as it jumps around in time, often with no warning and no context provided. This method though captures the chaos in Marcello’s fragile psyche and the many clashing experiences that contributed to it. Despite being dubbed into Italian, French Jean-Louis Trintignant gives one of his best performances as Marcello. His handsomeness helps to hide his character’s nervousness. Marcello is guarded and closed off, but Trintignant veers between inscrutable to painfully vulnerable. Dominique Sanda also displays great screen presence as Anna, and Stefania Sandrelli is perfect as the guileless Giulia.
“In the running for most beautifully shot film of all time, The Conformist is as much Vittorio Storaro’s baby as Bertolucci’s. Storaro’s images are at different times or even at the same time rich, elegant, and harsh. He gives us the stunning blue gloom in the shots around the Musee d’Orsay and the Eiffel Tower, the blinds in Giulia’s home resulting in strips of light everywhere, and the beautiful yet cold fogged forest of the assassination attempt. One of the most striking moments in the movie is the Plato’s cave conversation that starts with Marcello closing the shutters in Professor Quadri’s office, suddenly casting Marcello into darkness while the light from the only uncovered window streams outward from Quadri who stands in front of it. The film’s look and subtly ominous vibe clearly influenced Francis Ford Coppola in the making of his
“The Conformist may also be Bertolucci’s most poetic movie as we get moments like the boys chasing young Marcello in his chauffeured car right after having tortured him; Marcello posing with his newly furnished gun, briefly aiming it at his own head, and the scenes of brutalist architecture that overwhelms the small human bodies in its midst. It all vibrantly resonates in a story about a man who blinds himself with amorality, striving for normalcy even when it initially doesn’t bother him that it involves murder to get it.”
Living in New York City ever since attending NYU’s graduate film program, George Wu has on average watched 1 movie every other day since his late teens and that’s while averaging only 1 movie a week the last few years, revealing the magnitude of this disorder earlier in life.
50th Anniversary Award - Best Films of 1970:
1. The Conformist (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy) [111/15]
2. M*A*S*H (dir. Robert Altman, USA) [71/11]
3. Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafelson, USA) [69/10]
4. Le Cercle Rouge (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, France) [63/10]
5. Claire's Knee (dir. Éric Rohmer, France) [51/9]
6. Husbands (dir. John Cassavetes, USA) [48/8]
7. Gimme Shelter (dir. David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, USA) [47/8]
8. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (dir. Russ Meyer, USA) [40/6]
9. Woodstock (dir. Michael Wadleigh, USA) [28/5]
10. Cotton Comes to Harlem (dir. Ossie Davis, USA) [27/5]
Coming at 8 PM: Best Supporting Performance.
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