The Conformist (Extended Edition)
by Bernardo Bertolucci
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Actor: Enzo Tarascio, Fosco Giachetti, Gastone Moschin, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania SandrelliDirector: Bernardo Bertolucci
Brand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
Cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro
Writer: Bernardo Bertolucci
Editor: Franco Arcalli
Producer: Giovanni Bertolucci
Producer: Maurizio Lodi-Fè
Writer: Alberto Moravia
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Portuguese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-05
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of The Conformist (Extended Edition)
DVD Review: Stunningly beautiful, sensual and complex
Summary: 5 Stars
Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a fascist when the fascists are in power but becomes an antifascist when the fascists lose power. Hence he is the conformist of the title of this extraordinary movie adapted by Italian film legend Bernardo Bertolucci from Alberto Moravia's novel. But more significant than his political conformity is his ability to bend his sexual nature to what is acceptable. The defining event of his childhood is his incomplete seduction by a gay chauffeur, whom he more or less accidentally kills. When conformity to the fascist rule in Italy under dictator Benito Mussolini becomes the norm, Marcello marries the ordinary (but very pretty) Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) whom he describes as "all bed and kitchen." Marcello thereby sentences himself to a boring but secure petite bourgeois existence. He will simply suppress his "abnormal" instincts.
In a sense this is a character study using a familiar theme, that of sexual repression leading to repressive political expression, such as psychoanalytic theory assigned to the fascist mentality. But Marcello is less interested in sadistic expression as he is with a secure existence. He is something of a shrewd coward, cold, calculating, and indifferent to the feelings of others. We see this strikingly in the scene in the woods when Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda), who is being chased by fascist thugs, pounds desperately on his car window. But he is completely unmoved and just stares at her with consummate indifference.
But what really enhances this film, making it one of the best I've ever seen, is the beautiful cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and the extraordinarily designed sets and scenes envisioned by Bertolucci. I am reminded of Michelangelo Antonioni's gorgeous Blow Up (1966) and Swedish director Bo Widerberg's stunningly beautiful Elvira Madigan (1967) from the same era. I think Bertolucci wanted to make a film that was politically and psychologically significant but also one that was strikingly beautiful. He used not only sumptuous settings but hired two of the most beautiful actresses in Sanda and Sandrelli. And because this movie is about sex (as it almost certainly must be, having been adapted from a novel by Moravia who was a master at expressing human sexuality) Bertolucci made the movie sexy and sensual. Sanda, whom I previously saw in Vittoria De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis which came out a year after El Comformista (1970) where she played the beautiful, enigmatic, but icy Micol Finzi-Contini, here plays Anna the bi-sexual wife of one of Marcello's college professors--the man whom Marcello has been instructed to help kill. Sanda is exquisitely sensual as she works to seduce Giulia while at the same time both teasing and rejecting Marcello's advances.
Sandrelli is not be outdone. She too is beautiful and sensual even if the character she plays is a bit ordinary otherwise. The scene on the train where she describes to Marcello how she was ravished as a teen by an older man (the family lawyer) is very moving sexually, and very revealing because Marcello takes her description as a guide in how to make love to his wife! We can see clearly that he needs some instruction since he apparently is not really moved by her beauty.
While the film itself stands alone as an artistic achievement, I want to compare it to the novel from which it was adapted. The main difference is that in the novel we learn so much more about the character of Marcello because of Alberto Moravia's use of an interior monologue throughout. Rather than merely a conformist, in the novel we see that Marcello's character is that of someone who seeks the trappings of conformity and normality because he rightly fears he is not the entirely normal person he would like to be. Ironically it is Giulia who nearly always conforms to what is considered normal behavior and who harbors uncritically the knee jerk beliefs and opinions that she has learned from church and state. Marcello is attracted to her not so much because she is pretty but because she is authentically ordinary and therefore by association he too is not abnormal. It is abnormality that Marcello fears.
The ending in the novel is also different than in the movie although the sense of who Marcello is does not change. In the novel Quadri is a hunchback and his wife is clearly a lesbian who has married him for convenience and security, whereas in this film she is bisexual and he is more like someone she might marry for love. Another difference is in how what happens to the Quadris and the extent to which Marcello is responsible. Bertolucci chose to have Marcello at the scene, whereas in the novel he has no direct experience of their fate. Of course the novel, which is over a hundred thousand words long, goes more deeply into the character of Marcello than is possible in a film. The true psychological complexity of his character comes through, especially his struggle with sexual ambiguity. We see more clearly why he embraced fascism.
But the film is true to the novel in most respects and certainly in the main sense that Moravia intended, that of showing how a particular type of fascist mentality arises and is maintained. But Marcello, although an authentic fascist is not necessary a typical one. The idea that fascists in general follow the herd and adopt a superficial and uncultured world view is no doubt largely correct, but the essence of fascism is the belief in authoritarian rule, the stratification of society, intolerance of diversity, and a willingness, even an eagerness, to use force and violence to obtain such ends. The psychology underlying the portrait by Moravia and Bertolucci is the idea that Marcello sees in himself violent and selfish tendencies and so it is only natural that he should adopt a political philosophy that condones and acts out such tendencies.
Description of The Conformist (Extended Edition)
From Bernardo Bertolucci comes this stunning masterwork which explores the rise of fascism in Italy. A young wealthy follower of Mussolini is called on to kill a former college professor forcing him to examine why he associates sex with violence while coming to grips with his own homosexuality. Jean-Louis Trintignant Stefania Sandrelli Dominique Sanda starSystem Requirements:Run Time: 111 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 097360812145 Manufacturer No: 081214With The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci delivered one of his signature masterworks and joined the ranks of world-class directors. Based on the acclaimed novel by Alberto Moravia (who greatly admired Bertolucci's adaptation), this milestone of cinematic style concerns one of Bertolucci's dominant themes--the duality of sexual and political conflict--in telling the story of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a 30-year-old Italian haunted by the memory of a sexually traumatic childhood experience. As an adult with repressed homosexual desires, Marcello wants nothing more than to conform to the upper-crust expectations of Italian society, so he marries the dim-witted, petit-bourgeois Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), and willfully joins the Italian Fascist movement, traveling from Rome to Paris with an assignment to assassinate his former academic mentor, Prof. Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). As he grows attracted to Quadri's bisexual wife Anna (Dominique Sanda), who is in turn attracted to Giulia, Marcello's path of duplicity parallels that of Mussolini's inevitable downfall. He's on an irreversible course of self-destruction, on which his troubled past and morally corrupted present will collide in a soul-crushing heap of personal contradictions.
While the psychosexual aspects of Bertolucci's Oscar®-nominated screenplay remain dramatically compelling, The Conformist is now better known as a dazzling stylistic breakthrough, with sweeping camera moves, oblique angles, and innovative editing brilliantly applied to Bertolucci's rich themes of internalized conflict. In close collaboration with master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci crafted one of the greatest films of the 1970s, offered here with its richly relevant "Dance of the Blind" scene fully intact. This five-minute scene was cut from the original American release, then restored for the film's 1994 re-release. It's a welcome enhancement of the film's suspenseful historical context, which is fully explored in three bonus featurettes in which Bertolucci and Storaro discuss the story, production, and innovative style of The Conformist in fascinating detail. For serious collectors of important films, The Conformist is absolutely essential. --Jeff Shannon
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