THE CONFORMIST: Best Film of 1971

and 2015?
On Bertoluccis stylishly pained interrogation of one mans, and one nations, compromises for
the sake of power, acceptance and, desperately, happiness.
By Michael Atkinson January 16, 2015
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The Conformist
Radical flamethrower to Arthouse Apollo to Oscar-winning mastodon-driver to decadent
mezzobrow miniaturist, Bernardo Bertoluccis evolutionary arc has spanned now almost sixty
years, but nothing can compare to his fiery first Godard-gangscrews-Romanticism career phase,
a thundering attack of cinematic vividness stretching essentially from his first features in the
early 60s to the old-Flemish crescendo of 1900 (1976), during which time the films quickly
graduated from student politics to *epico* banquets of physical rapture and thematic density, and
redefined Italian cinema for a new global audience, once the famous law firm of Fellini, Rosi,
Antonioni and Visconti began atrophying in their autumn fame days. Bertoluccis critical record
since has been erratic, from Oscars to lovably loopy follies like Little Buddha (1993), but as the
years pass it remains imperative to recall how much of a miracle his New Wave-era run was,
easily to rank besides Francis Ford Coppolas seventies, and Carol Reeds late forties, to name
two others with careers that seemed to peak early amid a mysterious cocktail of circumstance,
grace, collaborators, ambition and zeitgeist.

The Conformist
In the middle of Bertoluccis belle epoque, in a torrent of silk and shadow, we find The
Conformist (1970), still an eye-watering testimony to the erstwhile dash of international cinema
and quite possibly, shot for shot, the most ravishing single film ever made. Manifesting novelist
Alberto Moravias shadow-box contest between political compliance and personal shame with
one of the most arresting mise-en-scene strategies ever concocted for any movie, Bertolucci has
created cinema that red-inks your inner calendar. Set entirely in rainy city afternoons and indigo
evenings, you can hardly help corresponding the film to seminal mood moments in your own
life. This was the age, after all, when swooning art films, not superhero blockbusters, were
students touchstones, and among the films that marked that generation, The Conformist was a
singular peacock, a triumphant cataract of passion and rue.

The Conformist
Told in timeline flea leaps, the story follows Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a would-be
sophisticate lining up with Mussolinis Fascists in the thirties for his own, very private reasons
as the title makes clear, this is participatory politics seen as psychosocial dysfunction. Being
normal is an ideal the fiercely closeted Marcello talks about a lot, his compulsive desire to
belong spiraling out to include marriage (to the fabulously pliable and obnoxious Stefania
Sandrelli) and insinuating himself into the Party by framing up his old university mentor (Enzo
Tarascio) and, by extension, the profs sexy, testy trophy wife (Dominique Sanda), truly a
disarming and unpredictable character choice, dolled up and tricked out like a vampy thirties
poster femme come to mannered life. The motor for Marcellos lost ping-pong-ing between
allegiances and whims (his toss-it-all yen for Sandas bisexual flirt moves to the heart of the film,
and then, terribly, is demolished somewhere off-screen and then seems to have never been there)
is an innocuous childhood accident of illegal sex and blood crime, from which spills a lifetime of
searching and emptiness.

The Conformist
Is it the greatest film ever made about being gay? Yes, because its not about sex but about the
sublimated friction between identity and society, limned in a Greek-tragic feat of storytelling and
lamented like a natural disaster. More than that, The Conformist is a bludgeoning indictment of
fascistic follow-the-leader, perpetrated as an orgasm of coolness, ravishing compositions, camera
gymnastics (the frame virtually squirms around, like Marcello) and atmospheric resonancethe
case is made in every frame for the decadent, twilit-Art Deco-noir style being itself a vaa fare in
culo refutation of totalitarian norms and dictates. The actors vogue, Vittorio Storaros lens
transforms every street and room into a catalytic baroque-ness, the clothes grip the characters
like iconic mantlesto a large degree, the film is an immaculate puppet-play about the tension
between pleasure (stylistic, sexual, etc.) and imposed duty. If all Bertolucci did was sit Storaro
(again, his accomplishment may be the apex of color cinematography) and ironic-heartbreaking
composer Georges Delerue at a table and give them drinks, he mightve done enough. But theres
a fire underneath the tailored rump of The Conformist that is Bertoluccis alone, insuring that this

is more than just Moravias morality tale well told but an ocular Gesamtkunstwerk, a whole
world and sensual experience captured within and exuded from a singular corridor of lanternlight.

The Conformist
For Italian cinema, The Conformist was a vitamin shot, the Italian film for cinephiles tired by the
seventies of Fellinis sawdust-and-tinsel showmanship, bored with Antonionis striving for
counter-culture hipness, skeptical of the New Wavey-ness of Bellocchios much-vaunted Fists in
the Pocket (an admitted inspiration, in any case, to the then-age-twenty-three Bertolucci), and
otherwise wondering if Italian cinema was heading into another of its periodic dips in creative
energy. (The 1980s, in Italy as elsewhere, is when the true drought struck.) But of course
Bertoluccis film was fashionably international, with two French leads (plus French meta-icon
Pierre Clementi, as the troll figure in Marcellos muddling, mythic backstory) and a post-dubbedto-suit-all soundtrack, and what was often found beguiling about Italian movies (the simple

passions, vaulting line deliveries, lusty lifestyle portraiture, earthy peasant-vs.-corrupt-urbanite

dynamics), as well as what was sometimes irritating (same), is all but absent. The Conformist
unpeels a vital and morally troubling sliver of its nations history (Italian cinema is not known
for acknowledging Italys transgressions leading up to and during WWII), and yet it never quite
feels like something symptomatically Italian, but rather a glam reboot of what global art film
could bepainterly yet socially interrogatory, emotionally unchained yet sophisticated.

The Conformist
Bertolucci had begun as an ardent Godardian, and on its glorious surface The Conformist feels
like a departure from the bomb-throwing, fragmented, overtly reflexive, spontaneous vibe of
The Grim Reaper (1962), Before the Revolution (1964) and Partner (1968), and a firm step
toward the mainstream. But the movie cannot be seen as any kind of sellout, and it has
Godardianism encoded in its DNA, somewhat secretly, from the continental trainride with a
sunset movie playing outside the window to the profusion of shock cuts and leaps of perspective,

and the degree to which Marcello, posing in his raincoat and fedora, and sporting a new pistol
given him by the Fascists, is as enamored of his own movie-matinee persona as was Jean-Paul
Belmondos Michel in Breathless.

The Conformist
But then theres the echo chamber formed between The Conformist and Godards Contempt,
released seven years earlier, both films representing a new accommodation with narrative for
their postmod makers, and both then occupying a lush, romantic, Georges Delerue-scored middle
country between meta-movie radicalism and populist international romances. Both films are of
course based upon Alberto Moravia novels, but impishlyBertolucci claims not to have read the
book when he suggested its adaptation to Paramount. Similarly, Godard derided Moravias The
Ghost at Noon as a nice, vulgar read for a train journey, and while neither film does
completely away with Moravias rich sense of character, and indeed both films depend upon the
novelists subtle psychological structures for their thematic resonances, each filmmaker busily

converted the books into a new kind of movie, films that know they are films, self-conscious and
voguing visual submersions that scene for scene attempt to sidestep their own stories
melancholy and seem often to move in counterpoint to Delerues plaintive scores. Its not by
chance that they are the two saddest films of the entire New Wave era.

The Conformist
Bertolucci wouldnt turn back. His Godardian itch thus sufficiently scratched, his penchant
toward grand, stylized drama for its own sake, magnificently filmed and pungently conceived,
would dominate, from The Spiders Stratagem (premiering in Venice just two months after The
Conformist debuted at Venice, making for some kind of world-beating Irish-twin coup de grace)
and beyond. But the vagaries of a filmography dont impinge on a movie like The Conformist,
which makes a good case for itself as pure cinemathere are passages of it that if you were to
remove them from their narrative context would still radiate emotional, thematic and ocular
meaning, from the leaves blowing before the roving camera on Marcellos mothers seedy estate

to that sunset train ride, the streetlight-burnished Roman streets, the dancehall lesbian-waltzslash-Brueghel wedding hoe-down, the giant and blithely carried Fascist bust statues, the chilling
assassination on the Alpine mountain road. As it is Bertoluccis film is a consummate fugue
between theme and form, the cinematic equivalent to an oyster, a silk robe, a glass of champagne
and a warm hand on your thigh, all enjoyed on a veranda at dusk, and yet still the pained
interrogation of one mans, and one nations, compromises for the sake of power, acceptance and,
desperately, happiness. Bertolucci doesnt make films like this anymore, but then neither does
anyone else.