Part of Restoration Roundup
Based on Alberto Moravia’s novel and set in 1938, THE CONFORMIST has an edgily sinuous performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant as a tormented middle-class Italian intellectual marrying a mindless beauty and setting out to be the perfect fascist – to assuage the guilt arising from his latent homosexuality and his father’s insanity. Volunteering as an assassin for Mussolini’s secret police, he’s dispatched to Paris to kill a liberal professor. Fashionably for its time, the film attempts to reconcile Marx and Freud. But its real strength resides in the use of modern architecture and art deco to create the Italy of the 1930s, and its high romantic mode is wonderfully sustained by Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography.
Restored in 4K by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Minerva Pictures under the aegis of Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the original camera negative. With funding provided by Ministero della cultura and “A Season of Classic Films”, initiative promoted by ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes for the Creative MEDIA programme of the European Commission.
"Bernardo Bertolucci's expressionist masterpiece...offered a blueprint for a new kind of Hollywood film, which is why Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese and co owe him a huge debt" ––John Patterson, The Guardian "The brilliant mix of ideas, the audacity and originality of approach, the sensualist delight in the ravishing play of light and shadow -- all these remain, as bracing and inspirational as ever." ––Hal Hinson, Washington Post
