The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm
This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real
is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in
their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which
aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of
classic film.
Time Out review:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and
thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a
Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked
woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s
novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white
nostalgia. The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the
out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero,
volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.
Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned
quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the
greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’
agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici –
he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the
epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and
opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to
be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to
commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until
that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate
intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious
syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone,
exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score.
Wally Hammond
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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