The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

 

The Conformist belongs to the period when Bernardo Bertolucci almost seemed to derive from cinema itself, his films made up of one indelible scene after another, and yet feeling entirely unified, their structures and textures intuitively complex. A typical synopis of the film, as prompted by the title, emphasizes the protagonist Clerici’s project of attaining his concept of normality, embodied here by his marriage to a mundane woman and by his willing participation in the activities of the ascendant Fascist party, but while that’s not exactly inaccurate, it’s hardly true to the visceral experience of watching the film. On the contrary, the film teems with moments in which Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Clerici asserts and differentiates himself, whether physically (such as his exaggerated posing with a gun he’s just been handled) or behaviourally (his immediate aggressive attraction to the character played by Dominique Sanda): the memory that overshadows his life, of having killed a predatory chauffeur as a young boy, appears as much a source of perverse transgressive pride as a source of guilt. This perhaps well-equips him to participate in the performative aspects of Fascism, but not to be as effectively a cold-blooded executor of orders; near the end we see him damned as a coward, as repulsive to the Fascist order as their more usual victims. Bertolucci observes this progress through a dazzling series of compositions and incidents, both sweeping and intimate, creating a sense of a heightened, fragmented state that mysteriously channels that of Clerici. In the end, the fall of Fascism and rise of a new social order coincides with his discovery that his origin story was wrong all along, and he loses his bearings, becoming stridently accusatory before sinking into a final ambiguous silence. The grotesque theatre that enabled him, it seems, has come to a close; it’s just one of the film’s satiating ironies that the new world, however more worthy and just, may lack the dangerous, amoral panache of the old one.