Remarkable-looking movie with time-slippage editing. I think the Coens were taking style notes. Hopefully they took better plot notes than me – I wrote “a surreal kinda movie,” probably because it was late and I lost track of story details. Pretty gay and horny, overall. For all they didn’t care about sound sync, the Italians know good music (notably, the action moving from Italy to France doesn’t fix the sync). Brilliant cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor, One From the Heart), but this only got a writing nomination(?), losing to The French Connection(??).
Trintignant is a handsome, remorseless fascist assassin who had a traumatic youth. He takes a mission to murder an old friend, he and his wife (Stefania Sandrelli, the wimpy guy’s mom in Jamón, Jamón) get into a love triangle with the friend’s daughter Dominique Sanda (who’d reunite with Sandrelli in 1900), then he betrays pretty much everyone except his wife.
Mike D’Angelo on lboxd:
I’m something of a Sorrentino apologist, but rewatching The Conformist made me realize that he’s too often wedding maximalist formalism to equally emphatic performances, hat-on-a-hat-style; here, Trintignant’s opaque stillness is at disarming odds with all the canted angles, expressionistic colors and triumphalist architecture, and it’s the contrast that conveys meaning.
Trint’s dad, in a marble nuthouse: