#1: The Conformist

Il Conformista
Dir.: Bernardo Bertolucci
Italy 1970

111 mins

IMDb page
Rotten Tomatoes

It’s only right for Unsequence Cinema's first entry to be a striking and exceptionally well-made movie, and among my most recent viewings I can't think of a better candidate than Bernardo Bertolucci's breakout classic The Conformist. It was released to great acclaim in 1970, a time when cinema had largely broken free of heavy censorship (Communist and politically volatile states notwithstanding) and the acting we would now recognise as ‘naturalistic’ had established itself as a dominant style. True to its era, then, The Conformist has at least one brilliant performance (the lead, Jean-Louis Trintignant) and a few very taboo-breaking ideas working away under its surface. But its biggest achievement is its visual power – almost every shot is eyebrow-raisingly beautiful. I’ll upload some screenshots to prove it. It’s hard to believe some of these settings actually exist in the real world. They certainly don’t seem studio-built. Anyway, more of that in its right place.

I have to admit to initially missing a few of the more radical ideas raised by Bertolucci in The Conformist, and I think this is down to the very diverting central enigma of the titular character. Trintignant plays Marcello Clerici, an agent for the Fascist secret police whose motives are extremely difficult to pin down and whose reactions are almost equally hard to gauge. He is introduced in what appears to be a control room in a 1930s radio studio. While a jazz group performs on the studio floor behind him, Marcello explains to a friend what’s motivating him to marry a younger girl who is infatuated with him: “I don't know. The impression of normalcy… stability, security.” His friend enters the studio after the jazz band finishes and reads out a pro-Fascist diatribe supporting the alliance between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Later, Marcello is interviewed by The Colonel for his position as a Fascist enforcer: “Did you ever ask yourself why people want to collaborate with us? Some do it out of fear, most of them for the money. For faith in Fascism, very few. But you, no. I feel that you're not governed by any of these reasons.” Marcello dodges the question, and on this point the events of the rest of the movie hang entirely. Why is Marcello doing this? The film’s title suggests plainly: the same reason he’s getting married – merely to conform.

The narrative is told mostly in flashbacks, sometimes very long ones, from the opening teaser scene of a troubled-looking Marcello in the back of a car in drizzly Paris. This scene is cut back to, briefly, several times during the ‘proper’ set-up of our main character’s mission to silence a vocal anti-Fascist Italian exile, and so the audience knows from the very start that something must not have gone according to plan. The fact that Marcello decides to use his honeymoon trip to carry out the assassination seems like it ought to be a bigger clue into his real motivation that it actually turns out to be. Without letting any spoilers out here, the film goes on to portray our ‘conformist’ as a reticent lover as well as a reticent Fascist: he seems as unable to consummate his marriage as he is to pull the trigger on his target, who, not quite incidentally, turns out to be his old Philosophy professor.

This slight plot contrivance aside (the movie is not too reliant on realism), it raises very interesting questions – how can Fascism be the answer to a social philosophical quandary? Does Marcello really believe in it? He is totally indifferent about religion, going through the motions at a confession requested of him by his fiancée before the offscreen marriage (even though he confesses to some quite startling things, he clearly doesn’t value the idea of a redemption before God). The audience is left to do its best cod-psychoanalysis on Marcello because he is so difficult to decipher. No one else in the movie seems to be able to work him out either; they often have gross misconceptions of him, none more so than his devoted young wife, who can’t see how obviously mismatched a couple they are. His disregard for her leads me neatly into an important observation I failed to make upon first viewing. There is a sexual factor somewhere behind all of this: the idea that Marcello may have been sexually repressed into toeing the party line just to lead a normal life, to conform in the way he apparently wants to, just for its own sake. Italian cinema of this period certainly played around with links between Fascism and sexuality, most notoriously by Pasolini in his final film Salo (1975). It’s worth mentioning here that both directors were famously left-leaning and vehemently anti-Fascist themselves, but Bertolucci’s angle is very different from Pasolini’s allegory of rape and Fascist power. The Conformist, while visually bold and spectacular, actually tells its story quite sensitively, even reservedly. The lead character is, underneath his veneer, palpably a mess of tics and neuroses, and Trintignant plays it perfectly.

I’ll give away no more of the plot, but I must mention two particularly brilliant scenes: one involves a huge bar and a dancefloor, the other a pair of cars picking their way through a snowy woodland road. Both of these scenes are astounding, and demand to be watched many times over. Keep an eye out for them.

I promised screenshots to illustrate how beautiful this film is to look at, and here are some choice frames. I don’t know exactly which members of the production team are responsible for these (Set design? Production design? Cinematographer? D.P.?), but this kind of photography really keeps the movie compelling throughout the frown-inducing uncertainties of the plot and characterisation.

What makes The Conformist a thoroughly recommendable film is that it manages to balance the merits of an extremely tight piece of arthouse cinema with the scale and visual power of a ‘big’ production that doesn’t cut its corners financially. It’s such a confident movie that it almost strides right out of the frame, and is rightly heralded as a modern European classic. (This was never really in doubt – it must have garnered enough praise at the time for Bertolucci to be able to sign Marlon Brando on for his next feature, the even more successful Last Tango in Paris.) In 2010, Empire magazine voted The Conformist the 85^th best non-English speaking movie ever made, and frankly the competition up there is unreal. Watch it, but make sure you turn your brain all the way on first. You’ll need it.