The Conformist (1971)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
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What critics compared The Conformist to
The scenes in the villa in Rome with Bellucci are shot as if something out of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist , with mirrors to the fore and the use of dark gilt furnishings.
And the Rome sequence, with Monica Bellucci as a mob widow who seems to have inherited the vintage lingerie style of Sophia Loren, in turn carries visual echoes of The Conformist , The Great Beauty , and The Italian Job .
Hoyte van Hoytema (who shot the very different espionage classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ) films the Italian sequences with a shadowy indulgence that recalls Vittorio Storaro’s work on The Conformist .
But what truly galvanizes the images (beyond their triggering memories of our love affairs with The Conformist or Vertigo) is the “score,” a tailored pastiche of extant Adams compositions that includes music from Nixon in China.
With his bull build, haughtily handsome face and eyes like gun slits, Lopez forms one of the defining portrayals of fascist machismo, up near Jean-Louis Trintignant in “The Conformist.”
Both The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, the movies that guaranteed him a lifelong career, strike me at bottom as unconvincing theses about the incipience of fascism and the ironic boredom lurking within ribald, anonymous sex.
"The Dreamers" was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, maker of Oscar-winning hits "The Last Emperor" and "The Conformist," as well as "Last Tango in Paris," which earned Oscar nominations under its original X in 1972.
While it's not on a par with his great politics-and-passion epics "1900," "The Conformist," and "The Last Emperor," it vividly captures the tumultuous mood of the late '60s.
The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900 set a high bar for any filmmaker who’s probed the mysteries of sex in their wake, Bertolucci included.
As the film proceeds, the favoring of mainstream movie references extends to Bertolucci's own oeuvre: the Paris flat reminds me of settings in The Conformist, the incest evokes Before the Revolution and Luna, Theo's Maoist baggage takes us back to The Last Emperor, a desert tent in the siblings' flat alludes to The Sheltering Sky, and Matthew's espousal of nonviolence suggests Little Buddha.
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A chase through a forest evokes the climax of The Conformist, without the genuine horror that made Bertolucci's movie scald.
Coppola picked up the stylized color palettes for The Godfather movies, where the sepia became an idealized past contrasted with the chilly present of Michael’s corruption, and brought Storaro over to shoot Apocalypse Now, while Paul Schrader reached out to production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti to be his “visual consultant” on American Gigolo and Cat People, films with defining, carefully painted color palettes.
In one scene, Schrader talks about how he copied a shot of a cage from one of his favorite films, Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist."
Looking to get away from her party-girl roommates, Ellie rents a room in Soho that looks like it came straight out of a dollhouse version of The Conformist , the lights from the French restaurant across the street bathing her in reds and blues.
Seven Beauties, like De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist, appears to confront the moral problems of Fascism but really only registers a distaste for Fascism’s style: its philistine failure to recognize the high culture of the Jews, in De Sica; its brutal imperial architecture and interior decoration, in Bertolucci; and in Wertmüller, its affinities with Nazism, represented by a taste for Wagner and the appointment of a mountainous and porcine Shirley Stoler as camp commandant.