The Conformist and Rashomon

I started watching the restored Criterion edition of Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece, "Il Conformista" yesterday. I had seen and studied it in college numerous times, yet always with the annoying dubbed English soundtrack. It was great to hear it in the original Italian and French. Jean-Louis Trintignant is pitch perfect as Clerici, the disturbed Fascist convert spy, hunting his exiled former university professor and trying to understand the quagmire and depravity in his own soul. Vittorio Storaro's photography is breathtaking, especially on the restored version, and even if you're not fully cognizant of the storyline, you can't help but be hypnotized by the images.



Edie had ordered Akira Kurosawa's film, "Rashomon", which translates to "castle gate." It is another amazing movie I watched a long time ago, and hadn't revisited in a long time. Werner Herzog said that it was the closest to perfect a film can get. It's about a rape and a murder in a forest glade in medieval Japan, and the differing viewpoints of what really happened from the characters involved, a bandit, a samurai, the samurai's wife, a woodcutter and a Buddhist monk. It is so simple and masterful, it deals with human perception, lies, the idea of human goodness in a mad world.