The Conformist

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) is perhaps the quintessential espionage film, even though these genre specific qualities take a back seat to political commentary about 1930's Italy and Mussollini, conformity and fascism, and morality contrasted against amorality.

Indeed, this is a very amoral film, and centers on a spineless Italian, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who rises through the fascist ranks of Italy by betraying his friends and family for his country. In order to further delineate his innocence and maintain a facade, though, he marries and while on his honeymoon in Rome he is ordered to reunite with a former professor who has since fled Italy and assassinate this man in the name of Mussollini. What transpires is a character study of a spineless protagonist who feels conflicted between his past loyalties to the professor and his present loyalties to his country. Moreover, the professor's wife (Dominique Sanda) has also become an impediment to Marcello's ability to murder.

Within this narrative lies a psychological basis for Marcello's actions. He was taught by a soldier in his youth to connect feelings of sex together with violence, and while some might claim that this is just pretentious connecting, the film succinctly argues that enacting violence and sexual abuse upon children leads to an amoral acceptance of violence and aggression in the child's present. As a result, though Marcello begins to question his culpability in procurring the professor's death, these thoughts are often sublimated and compartmentalized, so that blind conformity is, in the end, what he desires. This, also, is what makes the last ten minutes of the film so haunting.

More so than the narrative, this is a film that exists on the strength of its music and images, allowing Bertolucci to posit the moral incertitude of Marcello through cinematic framing and the film’s mise en scene. Thus, although the film might initially feel cold and clinically rooted to ideas of Freudian psychology, the circular editing and subtlety of the images ground the film in the organic nature of cinema. The Conformist is a film that deserves its acclaim, since it balances elements of a sexy thriller together with a more profound questioning of fascism, examining how a nation so willingly became conditioned to accept this sort of fascist rule. A masterpiece.

The Conformist: 10/10