The movie follows 1930s Italian Marcello Clerici, a coward who has spent his life accommodating others so that he can 'belong.' But Marcello then becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.
It's yesteryear remembered with a combination of nostalgia and repulsion, a queasy combination that defines the film and gives it a kind of hideous allure.
Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in Citizen Kane, Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective.
Parallax View
March 14, 2015
It's a superb performance by Trintignant, whose presence is the film is physically passive even as he tries to play the confident, intellectual leader of men.
The one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design.
The unsettling blend of images and ideas in this movie cannot satisfactorily be disentangled or decoded, and it's the very strangeness of Bertolucci's masterpiece that has made it so influential in cinema history.