Am I Missing Something?

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Worst movie ever seen? Very time wasting. It took me whole day to watch this movie as this was very boring and there was nothing in it.

In 1938 fascist Italy a newly married man takes his bride on a honeymoon to Paris. He's the son of intellectuals, his father is in an insane asylum, while his bride is middle class bourgeois. The situation sums up his predicament, that he's a bit of a sensitive intellectual who is caught up in Mussolini's violent political culture with a pretty new bride who seems oblivious to it all. It appears he joins the Fascists to get ahead in society but his allegiance is put to the test after he's given the assignment to assassinate on of his ex- professors, a disaffected intellectual who moved to Paris to escape the fascists. Thus the honeymoon takes a turn to the ominous side. The story in Paris unfolds, leading to the event taking place on a snowy winter afternoon in a forest. His target and the target's wife suspected him all along but befriended him, with the ex-prof's wife even seducing him. Thus the title refers to those who lived under fascism without necessarily embracing it, merely going along with the current in order to try to succeed within a brutal system and not be arrested, with the system testing this individual's commitment to the cause. Mussolini is overthrown towards the end of the film, and the protagonist leaves his apartment to watch the regime's fall and try to switch over to the non-fascists who comb the streets looking for collaborators to execute. Bertolucci explores Italy's fascist past by portraying how it played out with a classic cowardly non- protagonist who fails to rise to the occasion.

Marcello, played by an impassive and stylish Jean-Louis Trintignant, is disgusted with his parents, contemptuous of his fiancée, and detached from his society. His sole desire is to feel like and pass as a normal person. He volunteers in a Fascist scheme against a former professor who is engaged in opposition activity in exile in Paris. While there, an attraction to the non-conformist and sexy wife of his professor and memories of a past he would rather forget complicate his plans.This is a movie where most of the main characters are sexy and cool and exciting, most of all the lead. Despite the supposition that Marcello is repressed and struggling to be as generic as possible, he comes across as self-aware, intense, and somewhat mephistophelian. Stephanie Sandrelli as his silly but well adapted to society wife and Dominique Sanda as his professor's intriguing, sexually liberated wife are both beautiful and entertaining. Despite that objectively the main character and his goals are ugly, the movie moves from one spectacular set piece to another amid an air of excitement.On the other hand, this is a film that seemed more impressive to me watching when fifteen years younger. The characters motivations often seem not so much mysterious as just not making much sense. Is Marcello supposed to be in love with the professor's wife or really a homosexual? Is she really attracted to him? And then, would Marcello really go around explicitly announcing his intentions all the time if he were so "repressed"? And for the film, too, maybe it would be better not to beat the horse so much? Then to the ideas that sexual repression cause fascism feel dated, and even more so the suggestion that it's all due to his being molested. There is the sense that we're less learning something about fascism or sexual psychology as we are participating ourselves in some confused sado-masochistic / spectacular turn on. The film is impressive but questionable if genuinely as deep as it passes for. It's a very enjoyable film that still encapsulates for me a lot of the excitement of cinema and would recommend to anyone who wants to watch a fun, cool film, but overall not really serious or a must-see except for its influence.

Really didn't like this film.Obviously it is highly respected however for me it was one of those typical foreign art(ish) movies. That means it is slow, pretentious and full of allegory, metaphor and satire.While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it does make for slow and dull viewing. It's the kind of film that would be good dissected in a film class but is no fun otherwise.You can imagine the kind of people who enjoy this are pompous art lecturers who snigger at the satire, less because it is funny and more because they get egotistical gratification out of sniggering not at the film but at the people who 'don't get it'.