GME NOTES WITH SADNESS THE PASSING OF FILM LEGEND JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT

Jean-Louis Trintignant, a leading French actor of subtle power who appeared in some of the most celebrated European films of the last 50 years, among them Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST, Eric Rohmer’s MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S and Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN, passed away recently at his home in southern France. He was 91.

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Jean-Louis Trintignant in the conformist

GME Streamline offers Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinematic masterpiece, THE CONFORMIST (1970) both a searing study of sexuality and politics set in 1930’s Italy and a triumph of opulent visual storytelling. Bertolucci combines a flawless aesthetic with a deep emphasis on composition, design, and camerawork to slowly build a devastating portrait of the kind of personality that allows fascism to flourish. The protagonist, Marcello (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), spends much of the film being followed by fascist henchmen who are shadowing him to ensure he carries out his orders. And to capture Marcello’s slowly building sense of being trapped in an inescapable situation — as well as the invasive, subtly Orwellian atmosphere of fascist life — Bertolucci’s venerated cinematographer Vittorio Storaro uses a wealth of different camera techniques.

In Mussolini's Italy, repressed Marcello, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode — and murder—joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind, an insane asylum in a stadium, and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda performing the tango in a working-class dance hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller's anthology pieces; others include Trintignant's honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window, a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office, and a murder victim's hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. THE CONFORMIST unfolds as a series of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks in service of a twisty plot with a distinctly noir flavor. The sheer extravagance of the film’s visual design — expressive lighting, lavish decor, sumptuous costumes, elaborate tracking shots — evokes the classic Hollywood studio cinema of Sternberg, Ophüls and Welles.

Repeatedly, the camerawork calls attention to itself in the French New Wave tradition (ALPHAVILLE): low camera angles rising to confront or trail after characters, as if the camera has been lying in wait; tracking shots that seem to follow the action from a surreptitious distance; and a few oblique angles that indicate both the main character’s completely askew moral compass and the increasingly distorted society in which he finds himself.

Bertolucci also drew heavily on German Expressionism (THE LAST LAUGH), with its exaggerated, distorted shapes, and the deep, heavy shadows as well as the stark contrasts of film noir (TRAPPED). Storaro and the film’s art designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti (both longtime collaborators with Bertolucci) also drew upon the 16th century artist Caravaggio, and his famous use of contrasting light and darkness. The mise en scène also deploys heavy contrasts of shadow and light throughout to indicate Marcello’s internal war with himself, and the depth of his conscious and unconscious desires.

The film consistently frames characters within bars to deepen the sense of imprisonment. These frequently take the form of horizontal and vertical shadows, as well as barred windows, trees and architecture, and occasionally literal bars. Furthering the sense of entrapment, the film is full of furtive camera angles. At various points, the camera seems to be stuffed into an odd corner of a room, or else dangling high overhead from a birds-eye view, or viewing the action from far across a vast room or landscape. All these shadows and visual references to imprisonment finally grow so intense that they infiltrate the action of the film.

The film’s style, both in movement and design, is symbolic of Fascism’s rise and fall. Just as Marcello’s attempts to order his life according to society’s harsh rules lead to his eventual psychic disintegration, so too do Fascism’s attempts at regimentation and authoritarianism lead to anarchy and chaos. The earlier parts of the film, full of the clean, imposing spaces of Mussolini’s Italy, are directed with a highly orderly aesthetic – symmetrical compositions, lateral, precise tracking shots, and very tight, controlled movements by the actors, particularly Trintignant. Bertolucci also filmed in a building with ties to the Fascist regime. The scene in the film that takes place at the Palazzo dei Congressi is where the protagonist Marcello visits his ill father. The Palazzo dei Congressi is located in the EUR district, a residential and business district in Rome. Benito Mussolini created the district in the late 1930s for the Esposizione Universale Roma, a World’s Fair that would be held in 1942, celebrating twenty years of fascism. The start of World War II and Italy’s involvement in the war, however, canceled the original plans for the exposition. The EUR district, as a result, was never finished, and the Palazzo dei Congressi, was completed nearly two decades later. The desolate area is now seen as a complete failure on a massive scale, paralleling Marcello’s solitude at the end of the film.

The later parts of THE CONFORMIST are draped in shadows, or shot through with unflatteringly harsh lights, working to create a unique sense of violent social turmoil. The finale of the film, set in a dark, dank prostitute-riddled corner of the Colosseum on the night of Il Duce’s fall, with distracting searchlights and other odd lighting effects, is a far cry from the cleanly lit, orderly spaces of the earlier scenes. The mixture of homosexual and heterosexual hustlers (among them the gay chauffeur Marcello thought he had killed as a child), the disorderly political protesters, the collapsing symbols of fascism’s fall, all create the sense that the protagonist has wound up in a world where everything he sought to suppress has come out of hiding and into full view.