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Arts
Friday, February 3, 2017 — 5
‘The Conformist’ and the
merits of character study
1970s film’s pertinent subject matter tackles diverse topics
from homosexuality to fascism, fashioning itself a timeless feature
Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The
Conformist” seems to sneer
at everything it celebrates.
It
mocks
the
excesses of the
interbellum
bourgeoisie yet
revels
in
the
beauty of 1930s
Paris. It’s one of
the most beautiful films ever
made that takes one of the
darkest times in history as
its subject: Europe’s descent
into fascism and World War
II. It evokes this world with
splendor, and, for the work
of a Marxist, seems less
concerned with details and
conditions of history than its
lost beauty. Its aesthetic and
political ambitions wrestle.
Ambiguity abounds.
An adaptation of Alberto
Moravia’s
novel,
the
film
follows
Marcello
Clerici.
He’s a middle-aged, upper-
class Italian man, a bit of
an intellectual and an agent
of the OVRA, the Italian
version of the Gestapo. He’s
on assignment by the Fascist
secret police to travel to Paris
and assassinate his former
professor, Luca Quadri, an
anti-fascist
dissident
who
emigrated away from Benito
Mussolini’s regime.
Marcello craves normalcy
— whatever that is — and
hopes to find security and
stability in the banality of
middle-class
life.
Indeed,
to be normal seems the only
desire he has — or at least the
only one he’ll admit. So he
marries the dullest bourgeois
girl he can find and drags her
off to Paris where he can kill
two birds — his honeymoon
and Quadri.
A
series
of
memories,
it’s told as Marcello and
Manganiello follow the car
of Quadri and his wife, Anna,
with whom Marcello has an
affair, in order to finish the
job. Pre-Vichy Paris, not yet
stained by collaboration, is
the site of most of the action,
and rather than a historical
representation of the city,
Bertolucci
evokes
a
city
inscribed
with
posterity’s
imagination.
Captured
in
rich,
distorted
chiaroscuros
of red and blue,
Bertolucci’s
Paris
is
a
dream and gives the film the
expressionistic flare which
has earned praise from many
critics.
In
Paris
the
object
of
Marcello’s desires appears to
have been found. He walks
down the Champs-Elysees,
while his wife window-shops
with Quadri’s wife, Anna,
with whom Marcello has an
affair. The quartet goes to
dinner, and later dancing.
But no matter what he does,
Marcello is not a normal man.
With a syphilitic father in a
madhouse and a morphine-
addicted
mother,
to
be
normal seems a reasonable
desire. Moreover, when he
was a school-boy, he was
picked up by a chauffeur,
Lino, who, promising to show
him a pistol, takes Marcello
to his apartment and makes
sexual
advances
toward
him, which are not initially
rejected. Marcello grabs the
pistol,
shoots
wildly
and
flees what he believes to be a
murder scene. Tally up these
aberrations from regular life
and normalcy becomes an
increasingly attractive home.
The film seems to offer
Marcello’s
repression
of
his homosexual desires as
a neat explanation for his
collaboration with the fascist
state. Or, at the very least,
fascism gives some form of
absolution for whatever their
sins — if not for the believers,
then for those who abide by it.
In an early scene, where this
adolescent episode is first
shown, Marcello reveals his
attempted murder to a Roman
priest during confession. But
he finds little resolution in
the clemency of the church.
It’s the state, rather, that
becomes a home for him,
and it legitimizes him and
overwhelms
his
moral
reservations.
As he spends time with
the
Quadris,
it
becomes
increasingly
evident
that
Marcello might not be capable
of killing them. Manganiello
attempts
to
slap
a
little
courage into him, but it’s
ineffective. When they finally
catch up to the couple, there’s
an accident — a car runs into
the Quadris. A group of fascist
agents emerges from the other
car, stabs and kills Quadri,
while Anna runs to the car
waiting a few meters away.
As Marcello watches Anna
scream for her life through
his window, he refuses to look
at her. The distance between
the killers and Marcello slims.
The lesson is clear: After
fascism takes hold, there is
no normal, and complicity
doesn’t absolve.
But even then, when it
seems resolved into a firm
political position, the film
retains its strangeness. The
film hardly means whatever
it claims — it’s too complex
to
merely
equate
sexual
repression
and
political
violence. If the film cannot
reconcile
the
competition
between art and politics, it
does not needlessly sew them
together.
In the final scenes of the
film after Mussolini’s fall
from power, Marcello sees
Lino for the second time,
now seducing another young
man.
He
denounces
him
publicly as a homosexual and
a fascist. After then publicly
denouncing his friend Italo, a
blind man and former Fascist
broadcaster, Marcello gazes
at the body of Lino’s would-
be partner. Ideology cannot
corrupt everything.
20TH CENTURY FOX
!
KARL WILLIAMS
Daily Arts Wrtier
Reflections on Philip Glass
We all agreed that it was
probably the least interesting
concert we had ever attended.
Utterly lacking in variety and
generally monochromatic, the
cyclical nature of the music
failed to capture our attention,
the repetitive patterns seemed
to lack even a flicker of the
creative flame and there were
more than a few
moments which I
personally
found
to
be
soporific
in a literal sense.
The best part was
probably when we
snapped
a
photo
with
that
guy
who
looked
like
(but
wasn’t)
the
Grateful
Dead’s
Bob Weir.
This took place
around two years
ago
now,
and
the event in question was a
performance by the composer
Philip Glass and a violinist
whose name I don’t remember.
They played a handful of music
by the first of the pair, as a sort
of preview for an upcoming
opera of Glass’s that was being
staged at the same venue, UNC
Greensboro. I and two of my
close friends — a composer
and a jazz guitarist/composer
— attended on a whim, driving
from where we studied half-
an-hour away in order to
see a man who is perhaps
the best-known composer of
contemporary classical music
in America. None of us really
loved Glass’s music — at the
time we were more enamored
of people like Gesualdo, and
might have also been prone to
worship at the altar of Webern
— but none of us expected to be
as tremendously dissatisfied as
we were.
In between pieces Glass
spoke about his music into a
microphone, mumbling almost
indiscernibly.
I
distinctly
recall something about him
writing a piece “about 10
years ago now, in 1990.” After
the concert there was a table
selling Glass’s recent memoir,
“Words Without Music.” We
walked past it.
All of which sounds rather
harsh. And I suppose it is,
but that’s how I felt at the
time. In the years since, my
tone has softened on Glass,
but he remains a composer
about whom I am supremely
ambivalent. Over the past few
days I’ve been thinking more
deeply about him and his legacy
— prompted in no small part by
the pageantry surrounding his
80th birthday this week — and
it has had a clarifying effect. In
short, I may not be enthused
about his work, but I’m very
comfortable with his removal
from my “List of Composers I
Hate” (a perdition to which J.P.
Sousa is forever damned), and a
bit disappointed in myself that
it took so long.
Starting in the ‘60s, Glass
— along with composers like
Terry Riley, Steve Reich and La
Monte Young — was among the
first to develop a musical style
which has come to be known
as
“minimalism,”
music
characterized
by
simple,
slow-
changing
and
repetitive
patterns.
One
of
the
only
major
movements
of American origin
within the classical
music
tradition,
it
appropriately
draws
from a variety of non-
classical
influences:
from
contemporary
American pop music
it
took
its
simple,
consonant chord progressions,
from Ravi Shankar and Indian
classical music it took its
concept of time, from west
Africa it took some of its
rhythmic inspiration.
Glass himself has undeniably
had
a
profound
musical
influence,
especially
in
America. Perhaps more than
anyone else he embodied the
trends of postmodern music
in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and he
crossed over into the public
awareness like nobody else in
his generation. He became a
household name in the way that
Stravinsky did a few generations
earlier and no one has since.
Many of the composers active
today
—
both
of
younger
and
older
generations
—
openly
acknowledge
their
indebtedness
to
him
(such
as
Nico
Muhly,
whom
I
interviewed
in
2015
for
this
publication,
or
John
Adams, with whom I spoke
in
September).
I
suppose
even my own music has been
touched by his hand — I wrote
my first vaguely “minimalist”
composition while in Paris last
summer (studying as part of a
program modelled after one of
Glass’s own teachers, the great
Nadia Boulanger), though its
stylistic differences from Glass
are significant.
But Glass’s reach isn’t limited
to the classical music world.
Over the last week popular
figures from Paul Simon to
Laurie Anderson, both of whom
have collaborated with Glass,
have been lauding him in the
press. And in this I think can
be seen one of Glass’s greatest
strengths; he doesn’t confine
himself to just his little corner
of art. Throughout his career
Glass has consistently engaged
with other artists to create new
works together. And this is true
in areas outside of music — he
has collaborated with the poet
Allen Ginsberg on opera, with
film director Martin Scorsese
for his beautiful “Kundun,”
with director Godfrey Reggio
on “Koyaanisqatsi” and with
countless others on any number
of projects. And, at least to me,
it’s when Glass is working in
these dramatic media that he
is at his strongest as a creator.
Some
of
his
instrumental
music might make me feel
like peeling my epidermis, but
throw in a libretto and some
choreography and the music is
transformed into an engaging
and
meditative
experience
like no other (see: the opera
“Einstein on the Beach”).
Part of Glass’s appeal can
certainly be traced to these
collaborations, but it also comes
from the fact that his music
proved to be a democratization
of sorts. When he first came
to prominence — and broad
public popularity — he and the
minimalist
movement
were
seen as an alternative to the
abstract and elitist approach
of modernist composers like
Elliott
Carter
and
Milton
Babbitt, who were generally
locked away in offices on
ivy-covered
campuses
with
impressive names, inaccessible.
But Glass — and Reich, and
Riley — were easy to grasp on
to, unpretentious and hip. And
like much of the American
avant-garde — musical, literary
or otherwise — they dabbled in
Buddhist and Zen philosophy,
making them appealing to the
New Age crowd which was
rapidly forming.
My own first encounter with
Glass’s music came sometime in
middle school. I was spending
my summer in the mountains
of Colorado with my family,
attending my first live concerts
at the Breckenridge Music
Festival and generally savoring
existence. At a garage sale,
my mother found a CD of his
third symphony and “The Civil
Wars Suite,” and immediately
suggested we buy it. In a past
life, Mom was herself one of
these New Age types, and had
come to love Glass when she
lived in the Ginsberg-betrodden
hippie town of Boulder, my
birthplace.
For
her
26th
birthday she had even made
the trip out to San Francisco
to see his opera “Satyagraha,”
a work in Sanskrit (who does
that?) about the life of Gandhi.
On our drive down from the
mountains, we listened to the
CD we had found, the evocative
music perfectly accompanying
the winding road and rugged
landscape.
I hated it. Sorry, Mom. I
hated it.
But check back with me in
a few years — the way this is
going, by then I’ll probably
have canonized the man.
DAYTON
HARE
Senior Arts Editor
CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN
FROM THE VAULT
“The Conformist”
20th Century Fox
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Kehlani’s debut a success
MUSIC REVIEW
Kehlani’s
debut
album
SweetSexySavage
contains
exactly what the title might hint
at, but it’s more
than that. With
17-tracks and no
features,
it’s
a
sprawling record,
one
that
can
easily hypnotize
with luscious R&B rhythms
and the singer’s effortless cool,
leaving a listener lost among
the pink clouds floating behind
Kehlani. But be warned, it’s an
inferior experience to move
through SSS delicately. You
won’t
fully
appreciate
her
perspective — she’s a young
woman who knows what she
wants, what she doesn’t and
that both of those things are
constantly changing.
Sonically,
SweetSexySavage
stands on its own with Kehlani’s
singular style; moments across
the record, however, recall a
long list of artists who came
before her: Beyonce, Rihanna,
Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill,
who’s
prominently
seen
tattooed to Kehlani’s left arm
on the album cover. And those
are just a few.
SSS would as a whole benefit
from some cutting, but there
are more than enough moments
of pop, R&B and hip-hop glory
to
forgive
the
occasional
skip.
The
spoken
introduction
—
one of the album’s
highlights
—
opens with “My
condolences to those who have
lost me” (Savage? Check.) and
ends with “For still searching
for someone to understand
me better.” And just as the
final echo of the intro hits the
eardrum, the irresistible bass
line of “Keep On” grooves in.
SweetSexySavage
is
undeniably front-loaded. The
first verse on “Distraction”
boasts Yonce-levels of swag —
the nation should be begging
to be Kehlani’s distraction.
“Undercover”
interpolates
lyrics
from
Akon’s
“Don’t
Matter” with an ease that
should crown Kehlani the new
age queen of R&B, and if that
doesn’t, the line “I’ma tweet
our inside jokes to the outside
world” might. And lead single
“CRZY” embodies all of SSS’s
strongest qualities: exquisite
cross-genre
production,
cutting, confident lyrics and
soaring choruses that are easy
to catch on to without bordering
on dull.
The album’s latter half would
benefit from a few cuts, but
nonetheless still holds some
of the album’s most striking
material. The cool distance of
“Do U Dirty” ’s verses sets up the
emotive delivery of, “Swear you
see the good in me” to abruptly
shift gears only to shift back
again.
The
instrumentation
of “Get Like” and flow of “In
My Feelings” rank among the
album’s most velvety moments
and the breakdown on “Too
Much” is too much.
The sexiness and savagery
are finished by the time the
final track, “Thank You” rolls
in. With a backing chorus,
Kehlani thanks everyone who
has helped her along the way,
but let me just say, “No, Kehlani.
Thank you.” SweetSexySavage
is a powerhouse of a debut.
Sonically cohesive and lyrically
on-brand from start to finish,
Kehlani has staked her claim.
CHRISTIAN KENNEDY
Daily Arts Wrtier
SweetSexySavage
Kehlani
Atlantic Records