SOURCE: Romney, Jonathan. Review of The Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci. New Statesman & Society 7, no. 288 (4 February 1994): 41–42.

In the following review, Romney discusses the obscurity of Bertolucci's The Conformist.

It's not uncommon to come across films that completely bypass understanding. What is rare is a film that eludes it—a more troubling, devious matter altogether. Bernardo Bertolucci's re-released The Conformist is such a film. It tells a story (albeit one that we have to reconstruct from complex flashbacks) and it has a point to make about psychology and politics. Yet, much as it might make perfect sense on one level, on another—what it's like to watch—it doesn't make the sense we want it to. It's remarkably obscure: not surprising for a film whose central metaphor is to do with blindness and darkness, but a little more surprising when you realise that the dominant visual tone of the film...