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Critics Consensus: A commentary on fascism and beauty alike, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is acclaimed for its sumptuous visuals and extravagant, artful cinematography.
Critic Consensus: A commentary on fascism and beauty alike, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is acclaimed for its sumptuous visuals and extravagant, artful cinematography.
All Critics (53) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (52) | Rotten (1) | DVD (6)
The unsettling blend of images and ideas in this movie cannot satisfactorily be disentangled or decoded, and it's the very strangeness of Bertolucci's masterpiece that has made it so influential in cinema history.
Bertolucci's boldest and most expressive film ...
The Conformist is celebrated for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's tumbling autumn leaves, but its emotional impact involves a tumbling soul.
Bertolucci's film has the compelling quality of a bad dream.
Ravishing to the eye but less than fully satisfying to the mind.
The movie is pure magic as story, as drama, as photography, as conviction, as everything except its ideas.
It's easy to overlook how stark The Conformist's political and allegorical message is because it's just so damn beautiful.
Its importance is that it uncomfortably relates the causes of political involvement (that cliché again) and the cost of such involvement...
... heightened, exaggerated, distorted, the world reimagined by the filmmakers as something familiar yet not. It is magnificent ...
The one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design.
It's a superb performance by Trintignant, whose presence is the film is physically passive even as he tries to play the confident, intellectual leader of men.
It's yesteryear remembered with a combination of nostalgia and repulsion, a queasy combination that defines the film and gives it a kind of hideous allure.
A different kind of movie about fascism than we're used to in the 2000s--one that makes little use of the jackboots and black uniforms and waving banners that have become almost cartoony fetishizations--The Conformist is in many ways the simple story of a man who takes a job. It's subtle and understated and chilling, a human story in an inhuman time that unfolds slowly, almost like a detective novel. It's rich in every shot and impossible to look away from. An absolute must-see.
Super Reviewer
Appreciate it more than I enjoyed watching it. Beautifully shot, incredibly insightful, often boring.
A fine movie, but dry and difficult to relate to. I can't imagine many people calling this a favorite. I have a great deal of respect for its craftsmanship, above all, most notably because the filming is beyond gorgeous. Vittorio Storaro, cinematographer extraordinaire and thrice-over Oscar winner, creates a film that looks insular and harsh even when the environment itself is enticing. A jovial dance scene turns into a cruel, claustrophobic show of mockery for our main character; a beautiful snow-covered forest becomes a scene of carnage and despair. The film is bleak and mundane, probably in keeping with its Fascist parallels, which strengthens the thematic link to its detached protagonist Marcello. He's unusual for his primary goal, which is to assimilate into the rest of Italian society and be completely forgotten. Along the way he somehow determines that the best way to do this is to become a low-grade Mussolini hitman, subsequently tasked with putting together a hit on his old college professor. Marcello becomes stranger still when you take his back story into consideration - he was molested as a child, a likely cause of his burning desire to be normal, and creating an unusual sexual ambiguity that adds weight to the ending. His loyal, oblivious wife was also taken advantage of by a much older man, and it's at this point you realize that the fact that they're both card-carrying Fascists is no coincidence. The notion of wanting to find your identity by shedding it completely is somewhat unnerving, and clearly the film's strength, because what still stands as a strong theme now must have been revolutionary in 1970. It's a little easy to kick the dead Fascist horse forty years after the fact, but so be it.
A visually stunning, subjective, psychological study of one man's pursuit of 'normalcy.' The plot is non-linear and revealed through a multilayered series of flashbacks. The portrait is rich with scenes of entrapment, Freudian undertones, and homosexuality. Dominique Sarda sizzles as the lesbian wife of the professor. The cinemetography is masterful. This is a film that withstands, and may require, repeated viewings to absorb its complexities.
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