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Until I watched The Conformist my only experience of Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci was 2003‘s The Dreamers starring Eva Green and Michael Pitt. Needless to say I found The Dreamers an easier watch, not least because the majority of that film is in English. The same cannot be said for The Conformist Bertolucci’s 1970 political drama. Spoken in Italian and French the film focuses on Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a young man starting a career in the Mussolini government. The film centers around Marcello’s mission to assassinate his former University Professor Quardri (Enzo Tarascio) who has fled to France. While this mission provides the essential plot, the film is essentially a character study of Marcello, the Conformist of the title. Through a number of flashbacks, Marcello’s childhood, marriage and his relationship with his parents are explored in detail.

The flashbacks form the first half of the film and while they inform the events that follow the non-liner time frame along with the language barrier can be confusing at times. By exploring certain traumatic incidents in his childhood as well as the strained relationships with his morphine-addicted mother and his mentally ill father, we understand why Mercello is the way he is and why above all he strives to conform to the world around him, socially, politically and sexually.

Mercello’s mission is further complicated by the presence of his new wife Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) who believes that they are traveling to Paris for their honeymoon. The character of Giulia is deliberately irritating and when the Professors young wife (Dominique Sanda) is introduced she provides a huge contrast. The film then goes through a period of a becoming a love-quadrangle of sorts between Mercello, Quardri and their wives while the two men try to figure each other out. This in itself could have provided the basis for an entire film and in the wider context of the running time it feels a little rush.

All the same everything that has gone before makes the climatic scene in the French mountains all the more powerful and we are now so deeply invested into Mercello’s character that he doesn’t need to speak.

In a final dénouement the film flashes forward to the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship and we witness Mercello struggling to come to terms with his past. To reveal more than this would be a spoiler but lets just say the incident with the professor is not the only skeleton in Mercello’s closet.

Your enjoyment of the film to some extent depends on your attitude towards subtitles. To me the only issue with subtitles is that it detracts from the performances, as your focusing on the text rather than the actor speaking. With repeat viewings this becomes less of an issue though and given its depth and complexity The Conformist definitely needs revisiting.

The Conformist is out now on Blu Ray and DVD.

The Conformist on Amazon 

It’s refreshing, I suppose, to be able to write a review of a film about which you have very little to say. When watching Lovers, Lies, and Lunatics, the second film written, directed, edited and produced by Amber Benson (the lesbian lover of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had an unfortunately fatal disagreement with a bullet), it was honestly infeasible for me to work out whether this was simply an abysmal mess of cinema, or just sort of passably forgettable.

This ‘quirky comedy’ involves a dysfunctional family being taken hostage by a pair of inept burglars who have been hired by the husband’s mistress to steal his money. Justine (Amber Benson) and Louis (Michael Muhney), the pair of criminals, are so shockingly amateur that they are caught out from the start when they decide to have (loud) sex on the kitchen floor and from there fumble at every turn, whether it’s using aprons to tie their kidnappees to chairs or removing their masks to reveal their faces. Comedic value is also meant to be added by the incongruous bickering between all the family members who seem to forget that they’re held hostage and descend into a tiresome family diatribe whenever possible.

Sub-par acting make the, already ludicrous, characters seem like they have verbal diarrhoea as they over share, spewing reams of superfluous dialogue at any given point. However, as the movie moves from one calamity to the next, as the robbery completely falls apart, Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics does have from darkly comic moments, indeed it’s so absurd that at some points it borders on hilarious, but it’s the kind of hilarious that you’ll either enjoy or simply switch off as trash. The saving grace of the film might be Christine Estabrook’s performance as Elaine, the wife, as she struggles with an unfulfilling marriage, her husbands infidelity, the bizarre hostage situation, and the general lunacy that surrounds her.

Farcical, with a lackadaisical air of nonsense, Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics is pushed on by Amber Benson, the little engine that could (but probably shouldn’t have). Just as the truly ridiculous dialogue flowed between characters, I similarly drifted between boredom, amusement and sheer bafflement that eventually gave way to ambivalence. I might have enjoyed it, I might have hated it, ultimately I’d have a hard time trying to ascribe any response to it with feeling.

It’s not an infrequent occurrence, waking up next to someone and not really knowing who they are, or what happened the night before. The Morning After, a short film by Bruno Collins, is about just that as Harry wakes up to find an unexpected someone in bed with him.

A clever and succinct story, The Morning After features an attractive cast in a story of sex, desire and confusion – both of who you are and who you want. The short is well shot with a high level of production, giving it a very cinematic feel, which combined with great acting make it a very enjoyable use of 15 minutes.

As the synopsis says:

The morning after a drunken night out, Harry’s (Joshua Berg) world is turned upside down when as he awakens to discover a naked man, Thom (Luke Striffler), in his bed. Stunned and confused, he tries to make sense of his repressed desires. In an attempt to re-assert his heterosexuality he revisits an old lover, Lucy (Juliet Lundholm), but finds little comfort from the encounter. Harry is left to make a decision: to follow his set path and return to his doting girlfriend Jess (Jane Alice), or attempt to understand his own wants and desires…

Coming tomorrow we have an interview with Writer and Director Bruno Collins, for now check out The Morning After below.

For more info check out: themorningaftermovie.co.uk

As most movies seem to be, Yamada: Way of the Samurai is loosely based on a true story – that of the titular Yamada Nagamasa – a Japanese adventurer who travelled to the Kingdom of Ayothaya (modern day Thailand) and eventually settled there as a governor.

Clearly the colourful life of a Japanese adventurer wasn’t quite interesting enough for filmmaker Nopporn Waitin, and so our Yamada (Seigi Ozeki) is a young samurai fighting for the Thai military, who finds himself the unwitting witness of a nefarious plan to seize power from Thai royalty. Like so many films of this ilk, the man behind the plot (a Japanese officer) has a seemingly unending supply of disposable henchmen to dispatch. It’ll come as no surprise that this will be important later.

Yamada’s knowledge of the plot finds him beaten and bloodied by a band of ninjas, who are fought off at the last minute by a group of mustachioed Ayothyan fighters. He awakens sometime later in their village, and the rest of the film starts to slide into predictability.

Naturally, Yamada’s recuperation involves him slowly understanding and adapting to the Ayothyan way of life. One of it’s most important aspects is its martial art – a form of Muay Thai boxing. Much of the film concerns itself with the samurai learning this new discipline, intermixed with crisp, golden shots of Thai scenery. There’s so many panning shots of Buddha statues and ruined temples that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching an advert created by the Thailand tourist board.

This thought is quickly washed away once the beatings start. The boxing style of the Ayothyan fighters is brutal to say the least – all kinetic, sharp elbows and stinging blows. The sparring scenes are well constructed, however they suffer from poor sound design – practically every hit sounds identical.

As Yamada earns the trust of the fighters, particularly forming a bond with their leader, it’s easy to see where this is all going. His loyalties turned, our hero ends up fighting the very people he used to be employed by. Sadly, this is where the film lets itself down. We are promised earlier on that if Yamada can combine his skills as a ronin with that of Thai boxing, he’ll become the ultimate warrior. After the best part of an hour of montage scenes of him training sans Katana, when Yamada finally gets into battle he becomes just another samurai. Dispatching his new enemies in sprays of iffy CGI blood, he seems to forget most of what he’s learned, save for the odd elbow to the jaw.

While the martial artists populating the film (many of them real-life MMA fighters) acquit themselves well, you can’t help but feel that it doesn’t quite live up to the colourful life of the real Yamada Nagamasa. Unless you have a particular interest in the fighting styles on show here, this may well feel like just another martial arts film.