Bernardo Bertolucci
Il Conformista

The Conformist: (1970)

Director and Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci

Marcello Clerici: Jean-Louis Trintignant

Giulia: Stefania Sandrelli

Manganiello: Gastone Moschin

Anna Quadri: Dominique Sanda

Luca Quadri: Enzo Tarascio

The Conformist is a film by Bernardo Bertolucci and is based on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia.

In his previous works, Bertolucci adopted a filmmaking style typical of the nouvelle vague, with its most representative figures in France (Godard and Truffaut).

With The Conformist, however, for the first time, we sense a more personal touch, what will be "his cinema". A distinctive style, both in content and directorial technique.

We are in the Fascist period, which spans from '35 to '43, from the peak to the fall.

Marcello Clerici is a young bourgeois who volunteers to join the Ovra (the secret police of fascism).

Soon, he will marry Giulia, a very pretty and coquettish middle-class woman.

These two actions represent for Marcello two "necessary" moves on the chessboard of life to steer his course onto a certain path, the right path, the "normal" path. This is the entirety of his being a conformist. This on the surface.

The Ovra will assign him his first task: to travel to Paris on honeymoon with his wife to target Luca Quadri, a professor, a dissident intellectual, inconvenient and dangerous according to the dictates of the heavy-jawed big shot. Objective: to eliminate Quadri, swift and decisive.

In the mission, he will be assisted by Manganiello, a special agent of the Ovra, a practical, virile man who does not ask too many questions, a cliché of the model fascist.

They will encounter the Quadri couple (Marcello was his student, his best student) and his wife Anna. The encounter with the Quadri couple will be devastating for his conformist surface, which represents his entire life but does not represent Marcello Clerici who is something else entirely, and what he truly is, we will never understand, but we surely know that Marcello, the central figure of the film, complex and indecipherable, admirably embodies the identity crisis that besets the man of the 20th century entangled in the bourgeois archetype (Bertolucci in The Conformist perhaps attacks the squalor of the bourgeoisie more than fascism). See, in this regard, the memorable sequence of Marcello Clerici in Doctor Quadri's studio, in the famous dialogue of the cave and shadows understood as an opaque reflection of the truth, where the photography of Vittorio Storaro plays with light and its opposite, shadow and light, therefore, in a contrast that has been defined as caravaggesque.

What will happen after the crucial encounter?

We won't say, but we can tell you that the film's ending does not match the book's ending.

The Conformist reveals a great passion of Bertolucci for cinema. The Conformist is technically superb. From the use of vertical dolly shots, numerous long takes, to deliberately tilted frames that imbue the film with a sense of alienation, to unforgettable sequences: Marcello's flashback, the party among the blind, the soft lesbian scene Sanda/Sandrelli, the cave dialogue already mentioned, the chase in the woods.

The actors - and the Trintignant, Sandrelli, Sanda trio were under 30 at the time - are in a state of grace, just like Bernardo, who loves them like a father and guides and "caresses" them with his camera.

It is a film rich both visually and in content. This modest writing of ours is by no means exhaustive; a treatise could be written on Bertolucci's The Conformist, a masterpiece of Italian cinematography and a benchmark for the years to come. Francis Ford Coppola, for example, before and during the filming of "The Godfather", continuously screened Bertolucci's film to the crew to learn and draw inspiration from a modern and innovative style of filmmaking ---- > http://www.ondacinema.it/film/recensione/conformista_Bernardo_Bertolucci.html

Also, the soundtrack by Georges Delerue, a giant, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Delerue is wonderful.

For us, it is probably his masterpiece, more than Last Tango in Paris, more than 1900.