The Conformist

One of the greatest-looking movies ever made, it’s easily the most important revival screening in town this week. It remains a career best for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who also shot Apocalypse Now and Warren Beatty’s Reds. The Conformist features rich, deep colors and lots of gorgeous and precise camera movement; you could watch it with the sound off and it would be no less impressive.

Bertolucci presents Alberto Moravia’s tale in a complex flashback structure full of Ophulsian lighting and some borrowed camera movements from Welles… Marcello’s repressed and displaced homosexual energy is the highlight of the spontaneous ideas appearing as oneiric, intercut flashbacks.

If Trintignant portrays Marcello with purposeful banality, Bertolucci uses elaborately stylized composition and cutting to tell the protagonist’s story. Compositions regularly marginalize characters against vast backdrops, shoving heads down to the bottom of the frame to lend greater importance to cavernous, fascist architecture and classical Italian décor. This produces innumerable great shots, most strikingly in the depictions of the rotting wealth of Marcello’s family.