Rating: 18/20
Plot: Marcello wants to be like all the other Fascist family men, but he's having a difficult time after being sent to Paris to assassinate his former professor.
I could easily write a thousand words, but you wouldn't read them, they probably wouldn't make that much sense, and pictures are better anyway. They're better in the case of The Conformist, at least, since the very best thing about this incredible movie is how it looks. The composition, the cinematography, the haunting colors, the camera angles. This is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen. Don't believe me? Click on the picture below to go to a site that collects a bunch of stills from this movie.
Everything's so perfectly framed, but it's not in a way that seems artificial. It's dreamlike, visuals that fit the anti-fairytale story, and it's really exhilarating. I think my favorite shots out of all the beautiful shots in this involve Stefania Sandrelli, the woman who plays Marcello's fiancee, a woman in a white and striped dress moving about a room where Venetian blinds cut stripes in the room. Or maybe it's a scene where a painting transitions into a coast, the clouds in the painting lingering to become the clouds in the sky. Or maybe it's a shot in a club where a window above the characters' heads shows pedestrians' legs passing back and forth. Or maybe it's that low-angled autumnal shot of swirling leaves and an automobile. Or maybe it's the shot of an eagle statue and a bust being carried, symbolism that I don't even understand. Or maybe it's lights breaking through winter trees.
Jean-Louis Trintignant stars in one of those complicated roles. There's a humor to the character, or at least a mild absurdity. Ultimately, he's a tragic figure, and that's not spoiling anything because you know he's going to be a tragic figure the whole time. I've liked Trintignant in the past--Amour, The Great Silence--and he's really good here. The woman, Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda, are alluring in their different ways, and they needed to be; otherwise, the story doesn't work. I also liked Gastone Moschin playing this sort of heavy, especially when he was silent. They're all pieces in a psychologically complex story complete with political intrigue, sex, and murder. My knowledge of European politics and especially fascism isn't strong enough to fully understand all the angles of this story. The connection between sex and violence puzzled me, too. The connection seemed obvious, but I didn't quite get what was being said, at least universally.
This isn't all despair though. There was quite a bit of humor in this, too. And I loved this line, one delivered by a blind person if I'm recalling things correctly: "A normal man is one who turns his head to look at a woman's bottom and notices that five or six others have done the same thing." That's a paraphrase, by the way.
Go look at more stills from this movie.
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