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> The Conformist (Extended Edition) |
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Staring:
Jean-Louis Trintignant,
Stefania Sandrelli,
Gastone Moschin,
Enzo Tarascio,
Fosco Giachetti
Director:
Bernardo Bertolucci
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $34.79
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
EAN: 0097360812145
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Paramount
Manufacturer: Paramount
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Paramount
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2006-12-05
Running Time: 107
Studio: Paramount
Theatrical Release Date: 1970-10-22 |
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Description
This story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello has just taken a job working for Mussollini and is courting a beautiful young woman who will make him even more of a conformist. Marcello is going to Paris on his honeymoon and his bosses have an assignment for him there. Look up an old professor who fled Italy when the fascists came into power. At the border of Italy and France, where Marcello and his bride have to change trains, his bosses give him a gun with a silencer. In a flashback to 1917, we learn why sex and violence are linked in Marcello's mind.
Amazon.com
With The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci delivered one of his signature masterworks and joined the ranks of world-class directors. Based on the acclaimed novel by Alberto Moravia (who greatly admired Bertolucci's adaptation), this milestone of cinematic style concerns one of Bertolucci's dominant themes--the duality of sexual and political conflict--in telling the story of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a 30-year-old Italian haunted by the memory of a sexually traumatic childhood experience. As an adult with repressed homosexual desires, Marcello wants nothing more than to conform to the upper-crust expectations of Italian society, so he marries the dim-witted, petit-bourgeois Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), and willfully joins the Italian Fascist movement, traveling from Rome to Paris with an assignment to assassinate his former academic mentor, Prof. Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). As he grows attracted to Quadri's bisexual wife Anna (Dominique Sanda), who is in turn attracted to Giulia, Marcello's path of duplicity parallels that of Mussolini's inevitable downfall. He's on an irreversible course of self-destruction, on which his troubled past and morally corrupted present will collide in a soul-crushing heap of personal contradictions. While the psychosexual aspects of Bertolucci's Oscar®-nominated screenplay remain dramatically compelling, The Conformist is now better known as a dazzling stylistic breakthrough, with sweeping camera moves, oblique angles, and innovative editing brilliantly applied to Bertolucci's rich themes of internalized conflict. In close collaboration with master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci crafted one of the greatest films of the 1970s, offered here with its richly relevant "Dance of the Blind" scene fully intact. This five-minute scene was cut from the original American release, then restored for the film's 1994 re-release. It's a welcome enhancement of the film's suspenseful historical context, which is fully explored in three bonus featurettes in which Bertolucci and Storaro discuss the story, production, and innovative style of The Conformist in fascinating detail. For serious collectors of important films, The Conformist is absolutely essential. --Jeff Shannon
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 Pretended Extended, 2010-05-10
This is a good transfer of a remarkable movie, HOWEVER, the "Dance of the Blind" sequence, which appeared in the restored version I saw in a movie theatre several years ago, has once again gone missing, this time from the DVD.
It's an extraordinary scene, only five minutes in length, so the time element could not have been a factor. Why go to the trouble of cleaning up these movies, and then arbitrarily hack out an important piece?
Another nit pick- the cut from the last shot in the film to the title for the clean up team is very abrupt, a couple of seconds of black screen would've been welcome-
Criterion, are you listening??? There is a golden opportunity here...
Can't be beat, 2010-03-31
This film is made the way Hollywood has forgotten how to do. It is beautifly shot and the camera composition and lighting is unbelievable. It is a film that is text book great!
Overrated, pretentious, and (most damningly) dull, 2010-01-18
The Bottom Line:
It cannot be denied that Bertolucci knows his way around a camera, but this mash up of fascism and sexuality never manages to be interesting or engaging; I went into this film expecting something near a classic and instead found a movie that threatened to put me to sleep.
2.5/4
Tepid suspense at best in this simple morality tale, 2009-04-22
The story does begin in an engaging fashion with a distorted timeline and brillant cinematography. However, the overall malaise and idle philosophising of the story soon drag it down. Yes, it is a condemnation of fascism (how novel), but there is little riveting in the story, and the interal operations of the secret police are clownish as well. Not overly convincing or emotionally involving as the characters are shallow and little developed. Pass.
What is Normal?, 2010-08-03
A visually stunning, subjective, psychological study of one man's pursuit of 'normalcy.' The plot is non-linear and revealed through a multilayered series of flashbacks. The portrait is rich with scenes of entrapment, Freudian undertones, and homosexuality. Dominique Sarda sizzles as the lesbian wife of the professor. The cinemetography is masterful. This is a film that withstands, and may require, repeated viewings to absorb its complexities. Compare Bertolucci's adapation to Moravia's novel, The Conformist.
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