Short Take: The Conformist

The Conformist, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, is one of the few movies where the visuals leave one swooning. That's quite an achievement, but the even greater one is Bertolucci's making this bravura serve the material. The story, set largely in 1938, is about an upper-class Italian (Jean-Louis Trintignant) whose goal, after his troubled upbringing, is to lead a normal life. He's reserved in the extreme, but he's determined to marry, have children, and give them a stable home. The government is controlled by the Fascists, so he becomes a Fascist, and is made a member of the secret police. That's when the life he seeks demands a price. The government orders him to travel to Paris and assassinate a former professor (Enzo Tarascio) whose anti-Fascist activities have forced him into exile. The protagonist uses his honeymoon as a cover, and he renews his acquaintance with the teacher. He also falls in love with the man's wife (Dominique Sanda). The dynamic of the filmmaking is in the contrast between the buttoned-down manner of the protagonist and the often hyperbolic glories of the movie around him. The flamboyant staging and camera movements are as choreographed as a ballet. The Paris locations are used as the grandest of sets. The master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro offers some of the most atmospheric treatments of weather ever seen on film. Ferdinando Scarfiotti makes bold use of Fascist aesthetics in his production design, and his and Storaro's handling of color is gorgeous. The uptightness of the protagonist amid all this splendor is beyond absurd--it's perverse. The women make him seem even more discordant. Dominique Sanda gives a quiet albeit powerful erotic edge to the professor's wife, and Stefania Sandrelli, who plays the protagonist's ditsy bride, is a bubbly comic delight. Jean-Louis Trintignant's fine performance enriches one's view of the protagonist. One can always see the fellow's anxiety in his eyes, posture, and his rather creepy smile. Trintignant plays him with considerable nuance; one can always see his mind working, and while he's at odds with the film's other elements, he's anything but a dead spot on the screen. In musical terms, Trintignant is the percussion that anchors the extravagant melodies Bertolucci plays around him. The script, credited to Bertolucci, is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia. Georges Delerue provided the lively score.

Short Take: Deep End

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.


Director Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End turns the sexual coming-of-age comedy inside out. It's a potent blend of psychodrama, incisive social detail, and poetic filmmaking. A working-class London teenager (John Moulder-Brown) takes his first job as an attendant in a seedy city bathhouse, where he quickly becomes infatuated with a pretty co-worker a few years his senior (Jane Asher). The co-worker is a promiscuous tease. She’s engaged, but she's also having an affair with the bathhouse swim teacher, and she has no compunction about playing with the teenager’s feelings for her. Reserved and sexually uptight, he becomes obsessive and begins to stalk her, with ultimately tragic results. Skolimowski takes the viewer inside the boy’s psyche with a striking array of sexually charged poetic visuals. The green walls of the bathhouse become red as his obsession with his coworker intensifies, and its swimming pool becomes both the catalyst and setting of his fantasies. An extended sequence in which he follows the coworker through Soho’s nightlife makes the leap from the poetic into the hallucinatory. Moulder-Brown’s performance is engaging and unstudied even in his character's most disturbed moments. Asher is at least as impressive: the tease’s good-humored, spontaneous charm and her often vicious whimsy feel as if they’re all of a piece. The two do a fine job of conveying the romantic-comedy currents necessary to make the film’s final irony work. But Skolimowski’s crowning achievement is his ability to ground everything in the story’s social milieu. The film is very much a portrait of the sleazy side of “Swinging London,” and it subtly dramatizes how the libertine environment--the open sexuality, the porn theaters, the bathhouse's debauched atmosphere--can abet the perversion of adolescent infatuation into madness. The screenplay is credited to Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza, and Boleslaw Sulik. The picture has been notoriously difficult to see in the almost 50 years since its release, and is only now coming back into view.