the conformist (d. bertolucci)

It's been a quiet weekend. Today I took a stroll in Regents Park with my sister. I've read three scripts, done some washing, watched a bit of the rugby with Mr Blue and sat in Carluccio's with the same discussing the venn diagrams of relationships.

And in the middle there somewhere, yesterday, I saw this weirdly lit 1970 adaptation of a Moravia novel. The Conformist.

Carluccio's, where we retreated after seeing the film, felt like an extension of the movie. The lights adorned with strong primary shades. The waitresses in possession of a european prettiness. Two balding men at a neighbouring table with a Derrida tome on the table. To be replaced by a well-built woman who slices her spaghetti with a knife before consuming. Where we discussed relationships and ageing in a pleasantly esoteric manner. Bertolucci land, where nothing really seems to mean all that much, and it's all cloaked in a veneer of mildly distracting weirdness....

The film. I enjoyed the storytelling of the first half hour. Since all I seem to do these days is read other people's stories, it was refreshing to see how he'd chopped Moravia's text up and put it back together in a fractured dance. And then they all got to Paris and for some reason the director lost his nerve and the last hour was plaintively linear. The lighting seemed like a prefigurement of Saturday Night Fever. The imminent gaudiness of the seventies about to rain its dayglo patterns on film star faces. The girls... similar precursors of a decade of hair care and decadent innuendo.

At some point a critic has to hold up his hands and say it just doesn't work for him or for her. That's what happened with The Conformist. A book I savoured in a North London garrett in the weeks before a fateful trip to Italy, steeped in that subtle Italian equation of persona as opposed to soul, societal conformity jousting with apocalyptic desire, transfigured on screen, (in a supposed masterpiece), into a gaudy display of a director's gusto which sometimes paid off but eventually turned into a kind of gloopy mess. (How the austere brilliance of the Rome office scenes contrast with the mundane obviousness of the Parisian scenes). Bertolucci supposedly released from the shackles of his mentor, Godard, but actually floundering around in his wake, all the moves with none of the meaning.

So, as this is about the film and not the book, and also about my aesthetic response to the film in this day and age and not its significance in another day and age, nor the resonance of a political idealism which now seems as shallow as Clerici's own, let's leave it with the heretical notion that this film, The Conformist, has for reasons which some will know and others will deny, been over-rated. And if you want to enjoy the 1970's Bertolucci experience without having to sit through the film, save a few bob and buy yourself one of those fancy coffees in Carluccio's.