MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Der große Irrtum [de] • The Conformist [en])

Italy / France / West Germany 1970
d: Bernardo Bertolucci
Paramount Home Video (Region 1 us)

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Like The Spider's Stratagem, a subtle anatomy of Italy's fascist past, but here the playful Borgesian time-travelling is replaced by a more personal drive which heralds the Oedipal preoccupations that haunt Bertolucci's later work. Stripping Moravia's novel of all its psychological annotations except one - as a child, the hero suffered trauma at the hands of a homosexual - Bertolucci presents him simultaneously as a suitably murky protagonist for a film noir about political assassination, and as a conformist so anxious to live a normal life that he willingly becomes an anonymous tool of the state. Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in Citizen Kane, Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective (the marbled insane asylum where his father is incarcerated; the classical vistas of Mussolini's corridors of power; the dance hall where two women tease in an ambiguous tango; the forest road where the assassination runs horribly counter to expectation), demonstrating how the search for normality ends in the inevitable discovery that there is no such thing.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
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The Conformist is a great film, drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing. That last furtive look from Trintignant, over his shoulder, goes into the past and the future simultaneously and speaks volumes on his dread desire not to be noticed. For this is a man who has betrayed not just love and liberty, but his own identity, out of the fearsome need to be respected by a decadent code of order. It is novel enough to have a weakling and a scoundrel as our protagonist, but it is uplifting for an entire movie to place him as the spider/beetle in a web of complex political consequences. Our own past is here: Not just great cinema, but the chance of politics, too!
— David Thomson
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In retrospect, Bernardo Bertolucci's highly influential fifth feature (1969)--ravishing to the eye but less than fully satisfying to the mind--can be regarded as the lamentable turning point in an extremely promising career that ultimately chose stylishness over style and both over content. Following on the heels of his much superior The Spider's Strategem and adapted from an Alberto Moravia novel set in 1938, this political thriller follows an Italian professor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who's recoiling from his own homosexual impulses as he agrees to work as a police agent during his honeymoon in Paris and assist in the assassination of his former mentor, now a dedicated antifascist.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
The Conformist is a study of a man who, following a homosexual assault in his youth that led to a shooting, develops an enormous thirst for normality which leads him to become a Fascist in Mussolini's Italy. Jean-Louis Trintignant perfected a seemingly impenetrable blandness for the part of Marcello, whose urge to suppress his own individuality actually sets him apart from a world that, as Bertolucci depicts it, is full of complexity and contradiction. The Conformist is a series of compelling set pieces recreating Europe in the thirties, contrasting the imperiousness of Fascist Rome with the warm exoticism of Paris. All the potentialities of the French city are implied in the character of Anna (Dominique Sanda), wife of an anti-Fascist professor and doomed, along with her husband, by the Conformist's powerful attraction to what she represents. But if the equation of repressed homosexuality and Fascism plays a bit facilely, as Stephen Farber wrote in a 1971 New York Times piece, "I think Bertolucci is trying for a more complex psychological study than his conclusion suggests. He and actor Trintignant give Marcello surprising depth, and they manage to release him from the liberal stereotype.... The Conformist makes most sense as an exploration of the irreconcilable tension between the desire for freedom and the need for social acceptance.... The film is witty and perceptive about the magnetism of banality, and extremely bitter about the sacrifices civilization demands in return for absolution."
— PFA

Novecento

(1900 [de])

Italy / France / West Germany / USA 1976
d: Bernardo Bertolucci
Paramount Home Video (Region 1 us)

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The Last Emperor

(Der letzte Kaiser [de])

France 1987
d: Bernardo Bertolucci
Optimum Home Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

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The Sheltering Sky

(Himmel über der Wüste [de])

UK / Italy 1990
d: Bernardo Bertolucci
Kinowelt Home Entertainment (Region 0 de)

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Paul Bowles' novel presents the problem of interiorisation, and a presiding morbidity that would clear most movie-houses. Bertolucci has wisely elected to open things out and to humanise his characters, relenting a little in favour of romance. The American travellers in North Africa, Kit and Port Moresby, still go down the drain, but in this version you care. Remote husband Port (Malkovich) unwisely samples Arab prostitutes, neurotic Kit (Winger) has a fling with their travelling companion Tunner (Scott); but where the story really hooks in is their realisation, after an abortive attempt at sex, that reconciliation is impossible. Port contracts typhoid, and the couple's frantic search for help in increasingly primitive terrain makes for horrifyingly powerful cinema. After Port's death, Kit loses both identity and compass bearings, wanders into the desert, and enters into a sexual delirium with the Tuareg Belqassim (Vu-An). As you'd expect, it's a big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism. Malkovich and Winger play woundingly well.
— BC, Time Out Film Guide
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Director Bernardo Bertolucci's impenetrable film follows the spiritual/romantic travels of three Americans as they try to find themselves in North Africa. Based on a minor classic by Paul Bowles that has intrigued filmmakers for years, this failed attempt to adapt existential angst for the big screen is photographed with a golden, burnished glow and exquisitely scored using musical instruments from the region in which it was filmed. However, Bertolucci has built the foundation of his film on shifting sands, and, for all its technical mastery, the movie never succeeds in capturing the true natures of its characters. ...
Watching this seemingly endless major studio production, one's impatience rises to the breaking point as question after question goes unanswered. Who are these superficial bores who are so intent on putting down all those around them? Why couldn't they have simply gone to a marriage counselor and spent their vacation in a remote part of Long Island? Does Bertolucci really think he suggests emotional turmoil by having Winger stare off into the blinding sun? Rarely has a movie been so crippled by an unfocused lead performance. Winger's acting doesn't suggest neurotic restlessness as much as it does a woman's desire to win a staring contest. At least Malkovich is bad in an energetic way, but when his character dies all the juice flows out of the film. We're left with a metaphysical Yvonne de Carlo costume epic. In short, the viewer never really has any reason to care about the smug, self-satisfied bores who are this film's subjects, and can only wonder why Bertolucci has lavished so much time on them. Brimming with obscure meaning and devoid of drive and fervor, the film dries up in that symbolic desert sun, the victim of its own pretensions and a casualty of trying to film something best suited to the realm of cult literature.
— TV MovieGuide