Film Review - The Conformist (4K Restoration)
Images courtesy of Moving Story
One of the most visually stunning films ever made, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, has received an excellent 4k restoration. Done using the original camera negatives, Cineteca Di Bologna has collaborated with Minerva Pictures, and with oversight from Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci to release a beautiful restoration of the 54-year-old film.
Set in 1930’s Italy, the film follows Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a man whose first job as a member of Benito Mussolini’s secret police is to assassinate his old anti-fascist university professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). Marcello is the catalyst for the film’s analysis of fascism as a psychosocial deficiency, connecting it with his compulsive need for a kind of aspirational normalcy that goes against his deeply abnormal life. The narrative is told non-chronologically, opening just before his attempt at assassinating Quadri and tracks through the events and choices that prompted his fascistic worldview. This includes him dealing with his morphine addicted mother (Milly), his father’s (Giuseppe Addobbati) commitment into an asylum, his friendship with a (literally) blind fascist (José Quaglio), and his traumatic early experiences of sexual violence. All of these deeply strange characters and events tie into the film’s thesis, which is that the fascist obsession with normalcy and the persecution of the abnormal other is at odds with the variance at the heart of the human experience.
Marcello himself is a deeply cowardly and frustratingly indecisive character, and every possible sliver of audience sympathy is slowly erased by his deep fear of independence. Brought to life by an incredible performance from Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marcello’s mannerisms are so stiff and reserved that it gives the impression of the ideal taciturn fascist, but as Quadri states in the film, a truly serious man is never serious, and the cracks in Marcello’s façade are subtle but revealing. A small jog of childish excitement, a crack in the voice when talking to his mother, a nervous shuffle after getting orders, breaking out into awkwardly grandiose gestures at strange moments: these are all opportunities that Trintignant takes to reveal the truth of Marcello.
Another important contributor here is Vittorio Storaron, the director of photography, who paints with light and colour, creating some of the most stunning images ever committed to film. The colours are vivid and expressionistic, the sweeping camerawork is fluid and otherworldly, and the extreme wide-angle lenses warp the edges of the frame. It is expressionistic, but done with real intention, and the form matches the thematic content perfectly. The visual aesthetic emphasises the absurdity of the world, and it refutes the fascist desire for normalcy and order. Even the architecture of the film, prominently featuring 1930s Italian buildings, looks cold and cavernous to the point of absurdity in the extreme wides, as if they weren’t even built for humans.
The setting of fascist Italy makes it an oddity amongst existing canonical Italian films, and its existence draws attention to the absence. It’s an era that’s notably been brushed over by other great Italian directors like Fellini or Antonioni, who employed the spectre of fascism as a recurring element, though rarely addressing it directly. This could be due in part to Bertolucci’s youth: just 29 years old at the time of release, he was one of the first Italian filmmakers not to have lived through the country’s shameful fascist years, tackling the subject with searing condemnation. But Bertolucci’s most scathing criticisms are reserved for Italy’s handling of the immediate aftermath of the Mussolini regime, embodied by the resolution to Marcello’s story. It’s a turn that feels, at once, a scathing criticism of Italy’s inability to confront its past, and a pointed observation of the compatibility of fascist thought with life and success in post-war Italy.
The cliché would be to say that this film is more important than ever, but the truth is this film will never not be relevant. Being able to see such a beautiful restoration on the big screen is worth the price of admission alone, and I could not recommend The Conformist more.
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The 4K Restoration of The Conformist is screening at Classic, Lido, Cameo & Ritz Cinemas from Thursday the 25th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.