Birthday of The Conformist

On July 1, 1970 at the Berlin International Film Festival, the premiere of Bernardo Bertolucci's film "Il conformista (The Conformist)" took place.

The script for the film "Il conformista (The Conformist)" is based on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia, published in 1951. A rare case: while still taking up work on the script, Bertolucci warned the writer that he was going to change the plot. ""I told Moravia before starting: 'In order to be faithful to your book, I must betray it.' He said: 'I completely agree with you.' After he saw the film, Moravia paid me the great compliment, saying that there were only two adaptations of his books he liked. One was The Conformist." (For the record, the other was Godard's brilliant 1962 film Contempt, with Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot.) And this despite the fact that Bertolucci completely changed the ending of the novel. But 20 literary works of Moravia were filmed!

It was no coincidence that Moravia mentioned Godard: Bertolucci's admiration for Godard was known to him. Bertolucci himself called Godard his guru. And therefore, Godard’s opinion about “The Conformist” was very important to him. But ... Godard’s reaction after watching the film, Bertolucci described 37 years later, in an interview with British journalist Stuart Jeffries:

"He doesn't say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao portrait on it and with Jean-Luc's writing that we know from the handwriting on his films. The note says: 'You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.' That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet. I'm so sorry I did that because I would love to have it now, to keep it as a relic."

True, literally a minute later, Jeffries wrote, Bertolucci added, almost blushing with pride:

"What always made me proud - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence."

Stuart Jeffries completed his interview with the great Director with such conclusion:

"The Conformist, despite Godard's contempt, has proved to be one of the most -influential postwar films. With it, Bertolucci looked back at Italy's fascist past, finding psychosexual dysfunction at its heart. It is a film, with its bleak vision of human motivation, that was evidently made in the aftermath of 1968's failed utopian dreams, and yet one so visually daring and structurally sophisticated".

At the Berlin International Film Festival "Il conformista (The Conformist)" was nominated for the main award - the Golden Bear. But the jury, chaired by the American filmmaker George Stevens, decided not to award the main prize to anyone.

A year later, Bertolucci's film was awarded the Italian David di Donatello Prize for Best Italian Film. Bertolucci's film was accompanied in this status of winners in this category by the film "Waterloo" of Sergei Bondarchuk and the "Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)" of Vittorio De Sica.

A year later, the film "Il conformista (The Conformist)" received a nomination for the American Golden Globe Award in the category Best Foreign Language Film. But members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave preference to the Israeli film "Ha-Shoter Azulai (The Policeman)". "Il conformista (The Conformist)" was admitted to the fight for the Oscar in only one nomination - Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. And in this nomination, preference was given to the script of the film "The French Connection".

I happened to watch "The Conformist" in the 70s. At that time, the time of a cloudless, carefree youth, I was little affected by the political component of this film. I only watched the love triangle Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) - Marcello (Jean-Louis Trentignan) - Anna (Dominique Sanda). I admired my two favorite actresses. And how long their dance sunk into the soul! And not just me. I remember how, already somewhere in the nineties of the last century, I once chatted with someone about cinema, and in a conversation I mentioned "The Conformist" among my favorite films. My interlocutor asked: “Is this where Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda dance?”

Strictly speaking, my and other viewers of this film of the 70s inattention to the political, and even sexual, aspects of this film is not only and not so much ours, the audience, the fault. As it turned out today, the Soviet film censorship has thoroughly worked on the castration of this film. 40 minutes of screen time were cut out of it, and what was left after this surgical operation was remounted. Otherwise, one would think that the Soviet audience would not understand anything.

The famous Russian film critic Sergey Kudryavtsev, who, by the way, rated the film with the maximum 10 points, in his review of the film "The Conformist", assesses the consequences of the castration of the film by the Soviet censors as follows:

"the complexity of the psychological and socio-political motivations of the Clerici's arrival to conformism, and then to direct complicity with the fascists, was smoothed out, ideologically cleaned and sterilized. The ambiguity of life, the multi-layered nature of the novel by Alberto Moravia and the Bernardo Bertolucci picture still did not fit into the Procrustean bed of our rejected ideological dogmas. A careful analysis of the hero's past life, the explanation of his conformism and adaptability to the psychological trauma of childhood, youth and adult years for some reason were declared unfit justification of fascism in connection with its alleged biological, psychopathological essence. "The Conformist" was one of the first anti-fascist film productions that exposed the nature, internal conditions, and causes of the origin and existence of fascism as a form of indifference, apathy, and conformity of the masses. However, Bertolucci's film was recognized with significant reservations about the author's seemingly increased interest in the sexual, intimate side of life."

However, some modern Russian film critics justify the vivisection of Bertolucci's picture. Thus, Yevgeny Nefyodov writes:

"and in this version, the picture makes quite a strong impression! This, of course, speaks of professionalism and honesty (the maximum possible under the existing restrictions) of the then filmmakers, who did not distort and even strengthen in their own way - albeit by “straightening” the plan, cutting off the “dubious” motives of the Freudian sense - the picture is anti-fascist."

By God, while reading the words of justification of officials who allow themselves to "correct" masterpieces, the creation of which they themselves are not capable, the desire appears to "straighten" something and to "cut off" something at this apologist of censorship!

Despite the fact that this film, it would seem, is devoted to a problem that the world, it seems, has already solved by joint efforts, its relevance remains to this day. A confirmation of this can be the assessment of modern cinema viewers. 68% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a rating of 8 to 10.

Based on the foregoing, the rating of Bernardo Bertolucci's film "The Conformist" according to FilmGourmand was 8.208, making the film ranked 481st in the Golden Thousand.