On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen HOARSE OPERETTA BY JOHN SIMON Bernardo bertolucci must be one of the world's most overrated filmmakers, and in few professions does overrating race ahead as unchecked as in film. His...
...An insane asylum is a giant SDOrts amphitheater, all marmoreal whiteness, where inmates and guards seem about to compete in some nightmarish Olympic games...
...partial acceptance of the Catholicism he abhors...
...Yet there is no wound on the back of her head or body...
...Marcello first sees a whore improbably dressed in a blackshirt's uniform, a whore who is a pre-figuration of Anna, and played by the same actress...
...While Marcello watches, frozen in his impotence, the Professor is murdered in unlikely fashion by a crowd of men with knives, striking again and again--shades of Rocco and Julius Caesar...
...Thus when Marcello has just betrayed his mother's Chinese chauffeur (all these evil chauffeurs...
...Giulia takes this as a sign of great generosity, and as she tells how the lawyer undressed her bit by bit, Marcello re-enacts the seduction...
...bizarre, even surreal, effects...
...On Screen HOARSE OPERETTA BY JOHN SIMON Bernardo bertolucci must be one of the world's most overrated filmmakers, and in few professions does overrating race ahead as unchecked as in film...
...After this unexplained incursion of the surreal, reality swiftly returns...
...she has had, as a very young girl, a long and grubby affair with the elderly and unprepossessing family lawyer...
...We get Fascist office buildings that are majestic marble mausoleums in which sparse but enormous furniture looms in the middle of vast travertine expanses, and footsteps and voices echo like distant waterfalls in mountain landscapes...
...The Spider's Feast was a baroque phantasmagoria, its meaning virtually inscrutable, its pretentiousness insufferable...
...In extremis, she runs into the woods...
...wallowing in private fantasies...
...I wish I could bring myself to read another Moravia novel so as to determine where the book's flaws end and those of Bertolucci's screenplay and direction begin...
...Except, of course, that reality almost always looks expressionistic in Bertolucci...
...The Conformist is a sweltering desert crisscrossed by mirages that, being someone else's figments, make no sense even as mirages...
...The acting in such a film must needs be minimal...
...Marcello is fascinatedly watching Anna making sexual advances to his wife, while the seductress also watches the husband watching...
...And as the giggling, mean wedding night progresses, we keep seeing in the window bits of loveliness flitting by, and the colors of day exquisitely modulating into those of night...
...In the film, however, vice is superb, larger-than-life-size (certainly larger than virtue-size) and, as it were, heroic...
...Jean-Louis Trin-tignant as Marcello confines himself to making a few mean faces and striking a few fawning postures...
...She communicates this hesitantly, but Marcello, who is marrying her only for her body and the embourgeoisement she offers, merely laughs...
...They catch up with the Quadris--Anna was not supposed to go along, but did and must now also be wiped out--exactly in the woods where the ambush is laid...
...The Damned," Bertolucci has quipped, "is opera...
...All this could perhaps be made believable--Moravia may even carry it off...
...This is an expression of Bertolucci's love of decor for decor's sake, and, very possibly, of a worse love yet...
...The story concerns Marcello Clerici, a young middle-class intellectual from a messy family who so craves respectable conformity that, in 1938, he joins the Fascist party, marries an utterly conventional and silly petty-bourgeois girl, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), and agrees to turn his Parisian honeymoon into profit as well as pleasure by undertaking to assassinate his formerly beloved professor of philosophy, now a prominent anti-Fascist in exile...
...Bertolucci, however, prefers to make it into a madcap operetta...
...perhaps the most blatantly pretentious scene has Marcello, on the way to Paris, stopping off to see a Fascist functionary at Ventimiglia...
...When the Clericis call on the Quadris--he is married to Anna, a young and sexy blonde (Dominique Sanda) --Anna is promptly having intercourse with Marcello while really trying to seduce Giulia...
...People are often made to appear just as bizarre and baroque as their surroundings...
...Even this witticism was a steal from Visconti, who had said that Hitler and the Nazis were operatic, whereas Mussolini and the Fascists were operettic...
...But he cannot refrain from gorgeously gimmicking up the scene: much of the time, the couple is shot as a reflection in the train window, superimposed on the sumptuous marine landscape beyond...
...the good Professor Quadri is soon propositioning Giulia...
...Is the beauty of the backgrounds meant to give glamor to evil...
...All the women in the film--whether mothers, wives, or maids--are stupid, spiteful, or weird, and do not get to do any real acting...
...The set is first a huge Chiricoish painting of a seascape, then the painting dissolves and we see the same panorama as reality...
...putting up with the crudities of his wife and her world...
...The film's attitude toward homosexuality, too, is wholly and clumsily ambivalent...
...This must be meant in Moravia as a sardonic-moralistic comment on middle-class mores, and Bertolucci, I dare say, sees it that way, too...
...But The Conformist shouts too much: It ends up as hoarse operetta...
...His first picture, La commare secca, was pure trash...
...The tall, fantastic trees are photographed as a mighty cathedral with shafts of light slanting in through rose windows just out of sight...
...Is it meant to stress the contrast between natural beauty and human sordidness...
...Presently a horrible hag ushers him into the Fascist's office, where everything from the lintels to the desk is covered with closely stacked walnuts...
...Moravia tends to give us narratives in which a rather commonplace but dryly ironic view of political and sexual shadiness is supposed to take the place of texture, depth perception, life...
...Bertolucci, on the other hand, with a sensibility that derives from Viscon-ti, Zeffirelli and Pasolini (whose assistant he once was), strives for lavishness: opulent, indeed suffocating, atmosphere...
...the seedy apartment of the exiled Professor Quadri turns into an Art Deco show at the Orangerie...
...So a cowardly and filially impious act is suddenly drenched in extraneous, meaningless beauty...
...The film's last scene, added by Bertolucci, tops even this in improbability and portentousness...
...his second, Before the Revolution, much admired by the critics, was murky, pretentious and juvenile, and fed parasitically on The Charterhouse of Parma, to which it was an extended allusion...
...her entire face, though, is covered with blood...
...the manner, until recently, has been predominantly psychological realism...
...Thus Marcello and his sidekick, the triggerman Man-ganiello, drive in pursuit of the Quadri car through snowy landscapes of gossamer, fairy-tale stuff...
...Or take the honeymoon trip...
...It shows Marcello ambiguously ogling a naked young homosexual under the most preposterous circumstances...
...Now what does this juxtaposition accomplish...
...Anna manages to run up to Marcello's locked car...
...The Conformist is operetta...
...Unless, of course, it is his mannerist exaggeration taking over again...
...Bertolucci is much more interested in the sexual twilight (fancied also by Moravia) and in surreal imagery...
...Next, Marcello enters the indicated building, which looks like a fancy art gallery but proves to be a brothel that, in turn, houses the Fascist's office...
...Though the oafish Manganiello speaks with loathing of "cowards, pederasts, Jews," Bertolucci portrays homosexuals with an almost equal lack of understanding or sympathy...
...Now along comes The Conformist, based on Alberto Moravia's novel--Bertolucci's first film, we arc informed, aimed at a broader audience: more accessible, but no less fine...
...the pursuers' knives have miraculously changed into guns, and she is, after an unconscionably long chase, gunned down from behind...
...But this much is clear: Moravia's and Bertolucci's modes are, except for a shared fascination with sexual aberrancics, antipodal, and can yield only a Punch-and-Judy mismating...
...So eager is he to escape from his sense of uncleanness that he does not balk at self-purgation through politically approved murder--the psychologizing seems rather facile here, but let that pass...
...That cannot be the point either: Fascism is meant to be seen as a niggling nastiness, an extension of bourgeois pettiness to the ultimate ugliness of treachery and murder...
...Gven the low-angle shot, most of the screen becomes inundated with sere leaves a wind blows across the lawn to the accompaniment of a lushly melancholy crackling...
...Similarly, in Paris, a working-class bal musette looks like a gala affair, parquet and plate glass...
...But that is quite irrelevant to the work as a whole: The good natural life does not enter into it at all...
...Put these two modes together, and you may easily get ambiguity, but of the most fortuitous and barren sort, for which a phrase from a poem by Jorge Guillen seems the perfect epitaph: desierla refulgencia--arid brilliance, a desert of refulgency...
...dope purveyor and lover to the authorities, we see him jesuitically escorting her across the untended autumnal front lawn...
...I never saw Partner, but even Bertolucci's partisans deplore that one...
...Moravia was, presumably, most concerned with la trahison des clercs, which the hero's name, Clerici, points to...
...he sits impassive while she bangs at the window screaming for help...
...Achieving acceptance entails certain costs for this intellectual: betrayals wreaked on his parents...
...But Marcello is trying to shake off the memories of a traumatic act of violence when, aged 13, he was picked up by a strange chauffeur and, apparently, sexually molested...
...In a private compartment of the Paris-bound train, Giulia confesses to Marcello that she is no virgin...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 8
