"The Conformist" - Film Review

Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is one of cinema’s most unremorseful, broken sociopaths.

He wants people to like him. He wants his mom to love him (even though she’s distracted and sleeping with the chauffer); he’s got major mommy issues. He wants to be in control, especially of the women in his life; he takes more than a little pleasure in a few rape fantasies. He’ll get people to like him any way he can; he’s conniving and deceptive to everyone, especially himself. 

He’s obsessed with appearances. He wants the outside world to believe he’s perfect. He’s a fascist, or at least he wants to Italian government to think this in order to advance his career. Thus he joins the Fascist party without a second thought. He’s suppressing some hidden homosexuality, and he chooses to marry a woman Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) because it’s the normal, good looking thing to do. At 34, he needs to marry or people will start asking questions, and he just couldn’t let that happen.

Above all else, Marcello is, as the title claims, a conformist. He could care less about his wife; he could care less about fascism; he could care less about cheating on his wife; he could care less about religion but he’ll still pretend to practice it. He mustn’t look bad. His outward appearance must conform to people’s expectations. 

Bernardo Bertolucci shoots the film with a calculated stillness; a rigid uniformity; a blue-hazed, hermetic, sanitized, dull facade. The world Marcello exists in is as empty as his cold black heart. 

Part of the secret police, Marcello is sent to kill a radical professor (Enzo Tarascio) in exile in France. There he seduces the professor’s wife Anna (Dominique Sanda), partly to take more pleasure when he kills her and partly because he’s attracted to her ability to cut through “conforming”, constricting social standards. The film is charged with noticeable sexual currents growing out of Marcello’s fractured sexual identity, his obsessive desire for perverted sexual experiences, and his interior state clashing with his disillusionment of the outside world.

This morbid, fascinating character study is delightfully twisted. The film works as both an examination of the effects of fascism and conformity more generally. Its sumptuous, absorbing visuals are equally matched by a penetrating look into the mind of its protagonist.

Grade: B+