Film Forum

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy, 1970
Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominiqie Sanda
In Italian with English subtitles.
Approx. 111 min. 4K Restoration.

In Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode – and murder – joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller’s anthology pieces, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue (CONTEMPT, JULES AND JIM, etc.) and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro.

A KINO LORBER RELEASE.

Reviews

“A TRIUMPH OF FEELING AND STYLE. So operatic that you come away with sequences in your head like arias.” 
– Pauline Kael

“TRANSPORTS YOU INTO A WORLD OF PURE STYLE! Intriguing as THE CONFORMIST is as the reconstruction of one vexed historical moment – the late 30s – it is even more evocative of another, the late 60s and early 70s, when cinema seemed to be entering a period of decadence that was also a second youth.” 
– A. O. Scott, The New York Times

“Carries with it a remunerating jolt of youthful creative energy, the memory of a time when movies were the most important art and their creative possibilities seemed endless.”
– Dave Kehr

“Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in CITIZEN KANE, Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective, demonstrating how the search for normality ends in the inevitable discovery that there is no such thing.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)