The Conformist

The Conformist

1970

111 minutes

Written and Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, Enzo Tarascio, Gastone Moschin

For Bernardo Bertolucci, intimacy is artifice. Love, lust, longing--Bertolucci's characters don't possess these traits as much as they use them, like weapons, to get something, or achieve some sort of goal. Using careful composition and architecture, Bertolucci not only captures fleeting moments of intimacy, but he extrapolates the dark undercurrents of these moments. He's delicate in his depictions of emotional desolation, using a soft and kind touch to render dubious endeavors empathetic. To put it in a way Pauline Kael might appreciate, Bertolucci fucks his viewers gently.

The story of The Conformist, which is currently held over through the weekend at Film Forum, is told in a series of flashbacks. Bertolucci signals to viewers that we're in for a feverishly dreamy film by basking our main character in violent red in the very first shot while the credits roll. It's an attention grabber, with Georges Delerue's melancholic score slowly swelling and the classicist font appearing before us; already Bertolucci is pleating layers and setting up future mysteries. It's the 1930s. We meet Marcello Clerici (a serenely commanding Jean-Louis Trintignant), a 34-year Italian man with a privileged background and endless contempt for himself. His world,we quickly ascertain, is one of shadows and dust, feigned loyalties and betrayals. He carries unspoken guilt, and visits a priest to confess to a life of sins. Upon hearing of Clerici's sins (murder apparently being less important than a brief gay affair), the priest berates Clerici for not confessing sooner. But Clerici doesn't care. He's clearly not religious and seeks no comfort nor forgiveness from God: what he desperately wants is for society to accept and forgive him. Though Clerici's morals are as opaque as stained glass, his motivation is lucid: he tells the priest he wants to live a normal life. 

Ostracized as a young boy because his morphine-addicted mother and asylum-confined father were wealthy, Clerici was ridiculed and bullied by other kids. The one person who ostensibly wanted to be his friend, the affable chauffeur, was actually just trying to have sex with the young Clerici. The grown-up Clerici thinks lowly of his wife, whom he calls mediocre and stupid, and displays little loyalty for his friends. It's clear that he uses people to make himself feel better, though to little avail. After years of isolation and loneliness, Clerici decides to join Mussolini's secret police, who assign Clerici to murder his former professor, an exiled anti-fascist whom Clerici greatly admires. Clerici doesn't believe in fascism; in fact, his pseudo-progressive beliefs align more with those of his staunchly anti-fascist professor than his comrades. But his professor has been exiled, fascists govern Italy completely, and Clerici wants to conform, so he agrees. 

If your concentration slips for a moment, especially near the beginning (I had the unfortunate displeasure of sharing the theater with an old Italian man who bellowed throughout the first ten minutes and yelled at everyone who asked him to STFU), the elliptical narrative can be hard to follow. There are times, especially near the end, when Bertolucci slips into dream logic (the outrageous coincidence of Clerici running into his would-be rapist decades later, the man apparently surviving being shot in the face), and it's important to remember the memory-laden framing device. For realists and those who aren't enthralled by formalism, it might be easy to dismiss the film as a simple exercise in stylistic masturbation--it's stunningly beautiful, with nary a shot lacking in precision or grace. Bertolucci has always been more a master of mise en scene than montage (the latter is where Antonioni trumps him), but that hardly matters here, especially when he packs so much emotional information into each shot. I'm especially keen on the tracking shots that sway left and right, giving us slightly different glimpses of the same room, the same characters. 

But few filmmakers this side of Nagisa Oshima manage to make love and lust so disquieting. (Bertolucci's best films are, of course, far more human, and humane, than Oshima's, which rejoice in unpleasantness.) As an arousing aesthete, he's pushed envelopes that moviegoers didn't even know existed. He suffuses each and every moment of his films with an ineffable sense of love and loneliness; his characters are damaged people usurping cultural normalities, whether knowingly or inadvertently, and fighting against suppression. Whereas fellow Italian master Antonioni used stark modernism and rigid aesthetics as awls to dig at the malaise of modernity, often jettisoning actual human characters in favor of existentialist imagery (think of the vast monolithic buildings of Rome, the stoic stills of man-made objects, the stiff, slick hair of Marcello Mastrioni), Bertolucci's films feel alive, even as his characters are slowly dying on the inside. For my money, The Conformist is every bit as Sisyphean and desperate as La Notte, and uses color as well as Red Desert, though it's much more accessible than Antonioni's work.

In the most immediately striking scene, Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Delerue use high-contrast lighting to convey unspoken sorrow and insinuate the dimming of Clerici's soul; it's like a sort of visual prelude to Gordon Willis' work on The Godfather. Clerici reunites with his former professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio, who always seems to know more than he lets on), who mentions how bright and promising Clerici was, though the student was "always too serious." They're in Quadri's office, a typical stuffy intellectual domicile with various books wreathing the room and a big desk in the middle of the floor. There are bright windows looming on both sides of the frame. Clerici asks Quadri if he remembers how he, Quadri, used to veil the windows in the classroom to keep out the light; Clerici moves to the left side of the frame and shuts the blinds, so now light only pours in a thick gauzy stream from the right side, shrouding half the room in light, half in darkness. Quadri remembers, and they reminisce about Clerici's aborted thesis, about shadows and morality. Here Bertolucci cuts between shots with deft timing, creating a rhythmic sequence of medium-close ups that sprout like buds from the gorgeous master shot of the half-darkened room, the camera slowly moving down while tilting up, so that when Clerici moves to the foreground he appears to be the one in charge now. 

Bertolucci weaves moments of intimacy throughout, using sex as a means of understanding his characters. Clerici seems far away when he touches his wife Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), but genuinely committed when he touches Quadri's young wife Anna (Dominique Sanda); Anna tries to seduce Giulia while Clerici tries to seduce Anna, and everyone, of course, ends up alone. Or dead. The idea of attraction is corrosive in Bertolucci's world; think of the ill-fated affair in Last Tango in Paris (his most notorious film, and the progenitor of Kael's finest, most hyperbolic film review), which functions more as a self-flagellating experiment for the two lovers than actual intimacy. In The Conformist, a subtler, more delicate affair than Tango, Bertolucci shows how intimacy and love are superseded by acceptance. Some filmmakers use fascism as a lens through which we can view the preservation of the human spirit in spite of tragedy. It's become a trop of World War II movies. Not with Bertolucci. He depicts a society abraded by injustice and pervaded by hatred, but he uses the horrors to show the intrinsic need to be loved by the nameless masses instead of the genuine few. 

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