A Girl and a Gun: A Masterpiece, and then Some

August 04, 2005

A Masterpiece, and then Some

Let us put aside for a moment that The Conformist (1970) is the most magnificently photographed, scored, choreographed, and costumed film made--ever, anywhere--because while those are not insignificant achievements, there is more to this work by Bernardo Bertolucci, who finished it when he was just short of thirty. It is also the most evocative and stirring political movie of the post-World War II era, a framing of the emptiness and deindividualization which was the goal of fascism and how that experience played out in one particular life. I first saw it more than thirty years ago and was deeply moved and impressed; this time around, I was floored with admiration and astonishment.

Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a youngish Italian philosophy professor who announces his adherence to fascism and Mussolini early in his own career, looking for favor and advancement, but also looking for identity, "stability and security." His rather odd goal is "to be like everyone else," which is of course the goal that fascism has for man; the end product is to be uniformity, predictability, reliability, and it is possible to see how--for what used to be called an "other-directed" man, one who seeks his leads from the external world rather than from conscience or reflection--it could be an attractive pursuit. In the course of proving himself to his fascist betters, Marcello takes on a nasty assignment, the elimination of an Italian professor (once his thesis director) who is now in France saying unpleasant things about the regime back home. But he's not as callous and unfeeling as he has thought, his feelings for the professor's young wife start complicating things, and then his own wife's feelings for the professor's young wife give things another turn, and then everything goes wrong, for him and for the homeland, where we see it all coming apart in the picture's 1943 coda set in the ground-floor coils of the Coliseum, the perfect symbol for the crumbled result of Italy's attempt to restore past imperial glory.

To say that Marcello waltzes through these situations with the blitheness we might expect of a man with no internal compass is no abuse of an active verb. The characters here, as in so many of Bertolucci's earlier movies, cannot express the deeper rhythms the director is trying to reach by simply walking from here to there. They skitter, stroll, tip-toe--most of all, they dance, or march, to music. For Bertolucci, the dance is how we break out of our most rigidly imposed social conventions to achieve some flow, some beauty, some intimacy. The great dance of the blind at the boathouse here, and the republican/resistance demonstration march at the end, recall the dances of Before the Revolution (1964), The Spider's Strategem (1970), and Last Tango in Paris (1972). They are all breathtaking and hypnotic.

More: in every scene, the camera slips about into unlikely places, then quickly emerges into conventional setups, then again edges around a corner and sneaks a look from a revealing angle, but does it all on the fly. Nobody moves a camera like Bertolucci, and nobody moves one for him like Vittorio Storraro, the greatest color cinemtographer of our age. This may have been the movie in which Bertolucci forever broke the stranglehold of Godard's influence, but not of the master's insistence upon image over text. The Conformist is not meant to be summarized verbally, and cannot be: it is a succession of images, often staggering: long vistas, camera moving a ground level parting fallen leaves as it progresses, huge rooms empty except for one person (again, the visualization of fascism), views from outside in through windows, and the reverse. Nor are these simply compositions. Gitt Margrini did his customary spectacular job on costume design for a period picture, so that clothing becomes skin, and Georges Delerue's score is just what you want: managing somehow to be memorable and unobtrusive at the same time. Yet none of this is showing off: it all makes a perfectly integrated point, and you wouldn't want to change a frame or a note.

I don't know of a picture which handled atmospherics better after The Conformist until Wong Kar-Wai came along with In the Mood for Love, also placed in the hands of a genius DP, Chris Doyle. Sadly, I have the impression from hearsay that the film has dropped into the deepest circle of distribution hell. To say this is a pity is like saying that it would be unfortunate if all the scores and recordings of The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute were somehow lost or destroyed. This is one of the greatest of all cinematic treasures, and if you're within hitchhiking distance of New York City through August 11, brave the heat--the Film Forum is nicely air-conditioned--and grab it. It could be your last chance for many years, and even if it ever makes DVD (which doesn't sound too likely at present), this is of them all a big-screen experience non pareil.

August 04, 2005 at 06:18 PM | Permalink

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» A Masterpiece, and Then Some: The Conformist and George Fasel from Movie City Indie
Couple weeks ago, the 67-year-old George Fasel, keeper of the always-readable "A GIrl and a Gun" website wrote about Bertolucci's best movie; Wednesday, he passed away. The entire piece, the next-to-last he posted, is worth reading. Here's a little: "L... [Read More]

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A Girl and a Gun

August 04, 2005

A Masterpiece, and then Some

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