Ah, The Conformist, after all these years

Watching Il conformista (The Conformist) the other night on Criterion Channel took me back to the early Seventies and my glorious (or not so, ha) university days. This 1970 classic, possibly Bernardo Bertolucci’s best film, was released at a time when colleges were still in their post-1960s student ferment. And so a film by a Marxist film director on an anti-Fascist theme, shown by the weekend campus film society, was all the rage. But of course the film transcends mere two-dimensional politics. And one doesn’t have to be a Red to see the utter villany of Benito Mussolini’s wartime regime. Take for instance, the score by Georges Delerue, with its beautifully mournful opening to its ironically sprightly juxtapositions at key dramatic turns in the story. Then there are the characters. A very young-looking Jean-Louis Trintignant as the lead Marcello Clerici, a shrouded in mystery Humphrey Bogart type with long coat and fedora. He’s on a mission to assassinate, in Paris, an exiled anti-Fascist professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). The film is not just a political tract but a psycho-sexual and sociological one, with various explanations for Marcello’s affinity to Fascism and his desire to be “normal.” There is a homosexual overture by an adult in his youth, which initially entices but repels him. A scion of a rich family with a frivolously indifferent mother and father in an asylum, he seeks ordinariness. So much so that he pursues forgiveness by the Roman Catholic Church and marries a very average, dimwitted, girl, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). Then there are the scenes I remember best: the professor’s bi-sexual wife Anna (Dominique Sanda) trying to initiate an affair with Giulia, the group of acolytes like bodyguards – other obvious intellectuals – guarding professor Quadri. The film’s opening sequence of Marcello lying in a hotel room cast in violent red as the neon sign outside blinks on and off, the lesbian-inspired nightclub scene where both wives lead a crowd of dancers cheerfully encircling the alienated and morose Marcello. Then there is Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography: the angled camera shots from above as Marcello walks the dark Paris streets on the way to his mission, his diminution by towering monuments in Rome’s Piazza Augusto Imperatore, the beautifully stark art deco interiors. And, again, the characters, almost iconic, after all these years: the utter frivolity of Marcello’s wife Giulia who speaks in cliches and giggles inappropriately. And, in the end, Marcello’s ultimate cowardice who, after Mussolini’s downfall, turns colors and denounces even his best friend as a Fascist, a stand-in for himself.