Italy | crazed fruit

1970 – Bernardo Bertolucci

“Everyone wants to be difference… but you want to be the same as everyone else”

synopsis:

Italy 1938:
A weak-willed man, crippled by dark secrets from childhood, is seduced by Fascism. Volunteering as an assassin for Mussolini’s secret police, he’s dispatched to Paris to kill his old professor, now a political dissident. .

Part political thriller, character study and torn love story, The Conformist is a fascinatingly drama that studies the psychology that lies behind Fascism.

In a tale full of treachery, cowardice and sexual decadence – The Conformist makes a provocative connection between repressed sexual desires and fascist politics. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Marcello Clerici, a man scarred by a childhood experience, who is obsessed with the idea of regaining a “normal” life by trying to fit into the Italian Fascist State. Weak willed, opportunistic and devoid of any moral centre, Clerici serves as a symbol of the corruption of Italian society.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci, still only 29 at the time, named Max Ophüls, Josef von Sternberg and Orson Welles as his idols and the staging of The Conformist is comparable to theirs in it’s sense of operatic self-confidence. In fact, The Conformist seems on occasion to be more a visual poem than a movie and, in spite of some of the dark themes of the film, it still manages to remain uplifting for its sheer breathtaking style. Besides all else, The Conformist is an absolute explosion of cool! The Conformist is acclaimed like few other films for its sumptuous visuals and extravagant, artful cinematography, ravishing compositions, production design, camera gymnastics and atmospheric resonance . Exquisitely photographed by Vittorio Storaro, the sum total is a blend of the sensual haziness of ’70s European art-house fare and the high-contrast, anxious angles of film noir.

trailer:

links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conformist_(film)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065571/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/conformist/

reviews:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/mar/11/conformist-bertolucci-dvd-review-french

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-conformist

http://internationalcinemareview.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/bernardo-bertolucci-il-conformista.html

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-conformist/5204

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(Il portiere di notte) 1974 – Liliana Cavani

synopsis:

A concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) discovers her ex-torturer/lover (Dirk Bogarde) working as a night porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.

An operatic and disturbing psychological thriller that was highly controversial at the time of its release. Director Liliana Cavani claims to have been inspired to make the film after visiting the site of a Nazi concentration camp and witnessing a holocaust survivor laying a floral wreath – not to the memory of the victims but to the memory of her Nazi lover. The Night Porter explores the psychological terrain of such a complex but ultimately unfathomable relationship.The compulsive continuity of the characters locked into an inescapable and inexplicable desire to repeat the past is ripe for endless Freudian speculation, and in this case artistic inspiration. Beyond the psychological portrait of traumatised individuals, The Night Porter has a powerful warning that a similar compulsive quality exists in the dark web of political continuity between wartime Nazism and post-war Europe.

trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtLf_-9nXUs