LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

vwild The Conformist is very stylish in the way that fashion advertising or New Romantic music videos are stylish. It's self-consciously stylish. Dominique Sanda walks along a corridor and strikes a scornful pose in the doorway of a room like someone parading on the catwalk. Jean-Louis Trintignant walks along the pavement in front of an art deco building as the camera tracks with him in a wintry twilight. At the corner he stops, turns, gestures. A vintage car rolls up. So chic. The acting is stylish. It has that operatic largeness that we get in Visconti's later films. You can see the actors' performances from the balcony. At first all this attention to style is beguiling. There is a strange scene in an insane asylum filmed in the EUR complex. It looks oppressive and futuristic and dream-like, like a scene from 8 ½, but it becomes apparent that all this attention to style has no meaning. It is style for styles sake. At the end of one scene a shot is stitched on of autumnal leaves blown ominously along. What could it mean? Is it the "Wind of Change"? No, it's just leaves whisked about for visual pleasure. Who are we to scorn visual pleasures you may say, but the problem is that, at its worst, the visual pleasures begin to lead the action. The viewer begins to sense that a beautiful image was visualised and then a scene written to incorporate it. The characters' motivation is apparently to complete compositions or visual effects. Unfortunately for the viewer The Conformist is not content with stylish shallowness and tries to achieve depth or insight with what turns out to be a Freudian kitsch. There is a veritable cesspool of confusing childhood sexual experiences giving rise to bizarre adult behaviours. Fascism itself is some kind of psycho-sexual fantasy. It's all so very chic and depraved. Sadly we don't so much witness character development as a bunch of ids bumping against each other. It makes for tiresome viewing and tells us nothing about the psychology of Fascism or anything else that might give the film purpose. The Conformist looks good, sometimes thrillingly so, but it is weighed down by its rather dated psycho-sexual approach to character. The story suffers worst of all, being completely squeezed out by these other dominant elements.

bobgeatsburgers It's hard to describe this early work from Bernardo Bertolluci without using the word mesmerizing. This word fits the film in terms of both style and substance. The visuals never cease to be stylish and metaphorical. While the story never ceases to be engaging or thought-provoking. This is a story about a man who lets his political beliefs interfere with his personal life to the point where he does'not understand the difference between normalcy and fascism.Through a series of horrific events such such as killing his old friend and college professor as well as finding the man who molested him as a kid and who he thought he killed the main character learns that there is no such thing as a "normal life". Jean Louis-Trintinat is unbelievable as Marcello Clerci using restrained postures and facial expressions in order to fit in with the society of fascism. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is gorgeous in capturing symmetrical architecture of both Paris and Rome. This Film is a must-see for fans of both Arthouuse and Italian cinema.

Graham Greene The Conformist is primarily a stylistic exercise, but one where the stylisation is a part of the character's psychology. As such, it's one of the great works of cinema that is actually "cinematic."Since the entire film is a flashback within a flashback (the end of the film is in fact the beginning) it takes the form of an extended sequence of personal recollections in the life of a character haunted by terrible betrayals; unable (through arrogance or simple- mindedness) to understand how he could so egregiously sell-out his closest friends.As such, the film is not a linear retelling of actual events, but an abstraction of these events. Colour, lighting, camera placement and transitions between scenes are each intended to remove the film from reality and evoke the character's state of mind; his fear, passion, duplicity and cowardice reflected in the filmmaking form. The character here is intended to symbolise the progression of the country itself; here the question of complicity during WWII becomes far more relevant to the corruption of Italy's dark war-time past. As such, the film is as an accusation against this character and in turn an accusation against Italy during the pre and post-war years. For all this talk of politics, the character is not political. He is - as the title suggests - a "conformist." He presents whatever personality or conviction he thinks people want him to possess. As such, the filmmakers create a character preoccupied only with the surface of things; he's essentially shallow; a dress-up Marxist turned dress-up Fascist with no genuine beliefs or ideologies of his own. Again, this characterisation and the use of stylisation are a way to show the world as the character sees it (or more accurately how he wishes he could see himself); it is not the reality, but becomes more of an extended psychodrama of how the reality has been transformed by years of regret. Further, this lack of actual "character" is presented in other aspects of the film. The protagonist is a heterosexual, who after being molested as a child convinces himself that he's a homosexual, and then as a reaction to this tries to pass himself off as a heterosexual (again) in order to conform. This is something only revealed to the character at the end of the film when he finally discovers that the molester he thought he had killed as a child is really alive; his guilt and shame were his own invention. Finally the film is profoundly personal to Bertolucci. The relationship between the "conformist" and the professor is based on the relationship between the filmmaker and his great hero (and biggest cinematic influence) Jean-Luc Godard. Bertolucci, who desperately wanted to be Godard and couldn't, betrays his mentor and has him brutally murdered. This is further reflected in the style of the film, which builds on elements of Godard's own style (especially in the films Le Mepris and Pierrot le fou) with the influences of German expressionism, pre-war French cinema and the American film noir. With The Conformist Bertolucci is drawing a line under his "Godardian" political films of the 1960s and embracing a more formalist cinema that deals with the psychology of characters and their own perception of the world as they create it.

Phobon Nika What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? In a 1938 politically unstable Europe, a weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident. Il Conformista is a work of art that's as close to flawless as one can get. It's dapper, sophisticated, sexy, compelling and dearly cosmopolitan, whilst being metaphorical and gripping. And, moreover, for a subject matter than little of the audience will have any personal or sentimental connection with, it's deeply powerful and engrossing. Il Conformista paints the portrait of a bohemian, artistic and edging closer-to rapture Europe yet still highlights through intricate narrative, an in-depth character study of the weak willed, the distressed and the deluded a Europe that is on a political tether. In its parades and its dances, through its screams and its silence, Il Conformista is a masterpiece that connects the now and then, conflicting desires, oozing style and a confused culture in more colour, more grit and more eloquence than the proclaimed greats of yonder years ever managed to. The climactic ending is a highlight with an almost perpetual aftertaste, where the conformist himself (Jean-Louis Trintignant) undertakes the assassination of his former mentor in a misty, dimly lit wood, a setting to quench the thirst of Arthur Conan-Doyle, as the victim's wife, a former lover, screams bitterly. Our conformist relaxes, his hat shadowing his face, his eyes glinting with thoughts of a million facets pouring over them. Il Conformista is littered with endless examples of seductive cinematography, bold and inviting colour schemes, elaborate musical ventures and stylistically superior heights than anything I've ever seen. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Il Conformista is a thriller, and it certainly is thrilling, to say the least. To an impatient viewer, Il Conformista has whole other arsenal dimension of scenes that focus on deceit, murder, ill-intention and metaphorical dissidence. To a historian, the way that the portrayed era's political climate is capitalised on and exploited for dramatic effect is staggeringly remarkable. And lastly, to an artist, Bertolucci's genius behind the camera and his steady, wise hand in directing the lighting is second to none.