Arts & Entertainment

The Conformist

By team ⋅ March 29, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Guardian, 8 March

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist is a hypnotic, puzzling film about private life and political commitment

The mood generated is one of fascinated perplexity. Bernardo Bertolucci is marvellously faithful not just to Alberto Moravia’s novel, on which this film is based, but to the spirit of all Moravia’s work, where, infallibly, the more vividly and lucidly events are described, the more incomprehensible they become.

Marcello Clerici, an agent of Mussolini’s fascism, travels to Paris to infiltrate a dissident movement led by his old philosophy professor, Luca Quadri. But, during the journey, Marcello receives fresh orders: he must assassinate the professor. Since Quadri’s beautiful young wife, Anna, is always beside him, she, too, is at risk. The scene is set for a double murder.

Our feelings are never those we expect from such a plot. Little attempt is made to evoke fascism’s menace; there are no scenes of mass hysteria or images of marching soldiers. For running alongside the political thriller, or rather superimposed over it, is a sentimental comedy of the French variety. Marcello has just married the empty-headed Giulia and is planning to carry out his deadly mission during his honeymoon. We don’t respond with the smiles and tender anxieties that this genre usually arouses. The world Bertolucci creates for his characters is wonderfully lush, yet ominous and oppressive, too. The most trivial transactions are heavy with premonition.

The Conformist is a masterpiece, using colour, camerawork, scene-setting and flashback to achieve a perplexity and wonder that is entirely cinematic and leaves Moravia’s literary construct far behind. Almost every scene is shot in surroundings rich in colour or chiaroscuro, yet disturbingly claustrophobic in their grid-like symmetry.

Just as The Conformist addresses existential issues, it also begins to say something interesting about fascism: for example, that life is so baffling in its comedy and beauty that there will always be those desperate to stamp order on it; or alternatively that fascism, unlike nazism, was often more of a dream of decisive action than the thing itself. Either way (or neither), with its visual, textual and symbolic density, its music sliding from sinister to vaudeville, and its plot ever more impenetrable as it accelerates towards the violent denouement, The Conformist remains a hugely entertaining conundrum. You can ask for nothing better of a film.