The Conformist [Il Conformista] ***** (1970, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, Pierre Clémenti) – Classic Movie Review 3182

Writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci’s provocative, impressive, unsettling 1970 psychological thriller The Conformist [Il Conformista] has style to spare. It stars an ideally cast Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcello Clerici, a weak-willed 1930s rich Italian who embraces taking a path to fascism and murder because at heart he’s denying his true homosexual nature. It turns out he didn’t have the courage to respond to a chauffeur’s advances in childhood – cue an explanatory flashback to 1917.

It starts in Rome in 1938 when Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussolini and is courting the beautiful young Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) to make himself seem even more of a conformist. Marcello and Giulia, now his new bride, have to change trains border of Italy and France. He is told look up his old professor, a political dissident who fled Italy when the fascists came into power, and given a gun with a silencer.

Based on an Alberto Moravia novel, this is a deliberately disturbing and worrying tale, edgily acted by Trintignant in one of his best roles that plays to his strengths. The film is extremely handsomely photographed by Vittorio Storaro, and tautly but trickily directed by Bertolucci, who exactly captures the feel of the period in an outstanding display of visual style with the help of Ferdinando Scarfiotti’s amazing fascist-period set designs. Georges Delerue’s score is a distinguished work.

Dominique Sanda cuts a haunting figure as Anna Quadri, the seductive wife whom Trintignant pursues for the sake of respectability. It also stars Pierre Clémenti. Also in the cast are Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, José Quaglio, Fosco Giachetti, Yvonne Sanson, Milly, Giuseppe Addobbati, Christian Aligny and Pasquale Fortunato.

The Conformist [Il Conformista] runs 111 minutes but was cut to 106 minutes in 1969 in America and Britain. The beautifully restored complete version, with its adult subject matter fully intact, was screened in a 1996 re-release when it was advertised as ‘Bertolucci’s Masterpiece about Sex and Politics’.

RIP great film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, who died of cancer on 26 November 2018, aged 77, in Rome.

Jean-Louis Trintignant died at his home on 17 June 2022, at the age of 91.

Trintignant’s notable films include And God Created Woman (1956), The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), A Man and a Woman (1966), The Great Silence (1968), The Man Who Lies, Costa-Gavras’s Z, My Night at Maud’s (1969), The Conformist (1970), Three Colours: Red (1994), The City of Lost Children (1995), and Amour (2012).

Jean-Louis Trintignant won the Best Actor Award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival for Costa-Gavras’s Z.  He won the 2013 César Award for Best Actor for Michael Haneke’s Amour.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3182

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