Honestly, I didn't got it entirely. It kept me interested, but I was missing something I think

This film is filled with substance, yet still it is outweighed by the beautiful style with which it is presented. This was an exceptionally well-written screenplay brought to life by a phenomenal cast. This film was highly influential to Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather trilogy. It had influenced many other works, including the famous "Pine Barrens" episode of The Sopranos. Bernardo Bertolucci made one of the greatest motion pictures of all-time in il conformista. I not only recommend this particular film, but any film from the filmography of Mr. Bertolucci. 100/100 🏆

Jean-Louis Trintignant brings a strange energy to this meandering story about a man who yearns for a normal life as a good fascist.

Shot and edited brilliantly, Bertolucci crafted the perfect narrative about how totalitarian regimes are powered both by a small group of committed ideologues and by a large number of people performing as committed ideologues.

one of my top 10 favorites

Watch this for the cinematography. Color and light. Applause for Storaro.

Set in 1938, an agent of Benito Mussolini's secret police is dispatched to France to kill an outspoken professor who is opposed to Italy's Fascist regime. The agent, a former student of the intended target, rekindles his friendship with the victim and falls in love with the target's beautiful wife, all while beginning to question his loyalty to the regime. Once you get past the first half of the film, which may feel disjointed at times due to the number of flashbacks, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is a gripping political thriller about loyalty and self-doubt. More importantly, it is filled with some truly stunning visuals thanks to Vittorio Storaro's beautiful cinematography and some bold directorial choices made by Bertolucci. If interested in checking out Bertolucci's oeuvre, The Conformist is probably the place to start.

The striking cinematography is the hero of this desolate character study.

Dark psychological drama about multiple themes. Well filmed, convincingly acted with some memorable scenes. A classic continental film from the 70s.

In 2021, The Conformist could be considered an insider's look at radicalization. After all, the narrative includes the decision that the main character needs to make about killing someone who happens to be on the opposite side of his ideological beliefs. His former professor is an anti-fascist living in Paris. Marcello carries out his mandate, not without some inner turmoil, and, eventually carries on with his own life. Eventually his survival instincts for himself and his family kick in when Mussolini steps down and fascists are now on the receiving end of ideological violence. Bertolucci bathes this psycho-drama in beautiful cinema-graphic effects which comes awfully close to blunting his fascist critique, but, in the end, the intensifies it.

In this picture, Bernardo Bertoluccio touches on one of the most important themes of the modern world: the interaction of man and society, the dependence of human existence on external circumstances and, at the same time, the importance of realizing individual responsibility for what is happening. The camera work of Vittorio Storaro is simply mesmerizing.

Not only was this an interesting story and the characters complex and relatable, but the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro was beautiful and contributed to the plot and characters in ways I had never seen before. An astonishing film.

Amazing photography. Watch on a big screen

Como filme, belíssimo, como adaptação fiasco pela falta de profundidade, filme maravilhoso e apaixonante, até ler a resenha sobre o livro, percebi a lástima, que traz uma abordagem bem mais intensa e sofrida de Marcello, o drama interior atormentando o, ao tentar ser normal, entretanto seu íntimo flerta com um homoafetivo, enamora-se do fascismo, dentro de se o bem lutando contra o mal, a satisfação de matar vs incessante busca do amor, situações antagônicas do paradoxo interno do protagonista...

Bertolucci uses film as a true artistic medium, with his manipulation of lighting and shadows, camera movement and arresting mise-en-scène as well as a non-linear narrative structure to create a grandiose psychologically enigmatic character study that's intoxicating and alluring in equal measure.

Sublime, a masterwork of film direction.

In Paris, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) finalizes his preparations in assassinating his former college professor, Luca Quadri. It frequently returns to the interior of a car driven by Manganiello as the two of them pursue the professor and his wife. Through a series of flashbacks, he is seen discussing with his blind friend Italo his plans to marry, his somewhat awkward attempts to join the Fascist secret police, and his visits to his parents: a morphine-addicted mother at the family's decaying villa, and his unhinged father at an insane asylum. In another flashback, Marcello is seen as a boy during World War I, who finds himself in his family's wealth. He is humiliated by his schoolmates until he is rescued by Lino, a chauffeur. Lino offers to show him a pistol and then makes sexual advances towards Marcello, which he partially responds to before grabbing the pistol and shooting wildly into the walls and into Lino, then flees from the scene of what he assumes is a murder. In another flashback, Marcello and his fiancée Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) discuss the necessity of his going to confession, even though he is an atheist, in order for her Roman Catholic parents to allow them to marry. Marcello agrees and, in confession, admits to the priest to have committed many grave sins, including his homosexual intercourse with and subsequent murder of Lino, premarital sex, and his absence of guilt for these sins. Marcello admits he thinks little of his new wife but craves the normality that a traditional marriage with children will bring. The priest is shocked — and pruriently interested in Marcello's homosexual experience — but quickly absolves Marcello once he hears that he is currently working for the Fascist secret police, called Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. Marcello finds himself ordered to assassinate his old acquaintance and teacher, Professor Quadri, an outspoken anti-Fascist intellectual now living in exile in France. Using his honeymoon as a convenient cover, he takes Giulia to Paris where he can carry out the mission... Vincent Canby, film critic for The New York Times, liked Bertolucci's screenplay and his directorial effort, and wrote, "Bernardo Bertolucci...has at last made a very middle-class, almost conventional movie that turns out to be one of the elegant surprises of the current New York Film Festival... It is also apparent in Bertolucci's cinematic style, which is so rich, poetic, and baroque that it is simply incapable of meaning only what it says...The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film, at least in Europe where there always seems to be a market for intelligent, upper middle-class decadence." A review in Variety stated, "For those who appreciate its subtleties, but also its subsurface power and great evocative qualities, it's a gem." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "much more of a show than a story," with its narrative themes "all but lost amid Bertolucci's splendid recreation of the era. In other words, if you are looking for fashion and furnishing hints, this is the place." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times declared that the film "places young Bernardo Bertolucci in the front ranks of Italian directors and among the finest film-makers working anywhere. In this dazzling film, Bertolucci, 30, manages to combine the bravura style of a Fellini, the acute sense of period of a Visconti and the fervent political commitment of an Elio Petri ('Investigation of a Private Citizen') with complete individuality and, better still, a total lack of self-indulgence." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post said that the film was "an extraordinarily beautiful and spellbinding picture," but "what's below the surface doesn't stand up to much analysis. I think this is true and that it amounts to a terrible flaw. The dramatic material, while intriguing, isn't adequately developed: many connecting or explanatory scenes appear to be missing (reading the original novel by Alberto Moravia restores some of these), the psychology of the most complex characters is murky, and the climactic and concluding scenes are positively trite." Jan Dawson of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "In his screen adaptation of Moravia's novel, Bertolucci has eliminated all explanations or analysed motivations, as well as any allusions to Marcello's life before the moment he first sees Lino ... The effort of these changes, in purely psychological terms, is to reduce Marcello's story to a model Freudian case history." This arthouse film becomes a bit too arty and vague for me personally despite an interesting historical backstory with fascism and the OVRA as pillars. However, "Il Conformista" is like a dream sequence where nothing seems to be real and yet it´s supposed to be real, which in return shuts you out as a viewer. Yes, the cinematography and art direction are vivid, but it becomes more style over matter as the script is not hold together in a satisfying way. The dialogue becomes also a problem as Bertolucci present it in a way too theatrical manner making you not really embrace the spoken part of the film. Bertolucci is also trying a bit too hard to present all sorts of metaphors and philosophical ideas that becomes silly at the best. "Il Conformista" is not really my cup of tea. But, I must say that Stefania Sanderelli is quite stunning and her appearance caught my eye.

Shot and edited brilliantly, Bertolucci crafted the perfect narrative about how totalitarian regimes are powered both by a small group of committed ideologues and by a large number of people performing as committed ideologues.

1001 movies to see before you die. Although technically it was good, the premise was not my cuppa and it was tedious. It was on dailymotion.

The Conformist is a biting political satire that operates through character study rather than overt action. Where Schindler's List focused on an antagonist that was capable of tremendous cruelty by virtue of simply being unempathetic and blood-chillingly evil, Bertolucci instead lampoons the weaknesses that allow terrible actions to be perpetrated rather than the activist outliers that make the speeches and agitate the masses. Trintignant's Marcello is fundamentally weak, drawn to his fascist position not by some misguided sense of benefit in order, but to quash his own past that he feels deeply ashamed of. The clarity of the images themselves is shocking given the production period, and the cinematography matches for creativity and artistry - Vincent Storaro creates an incredible piece of film that engages visually as much as it does narratively. My only complaint is the bizarre romantic attachment between Marcello and Sanda's Anna (as well as between Anna and Giulia), which seems rather out of place and unjustified. (4.5/5)