Il Conformista 1970

[Michelle Benitone]

Aninternational co-production between Italian, French and West German companies, The Conformist opened at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival. It received widespread acclaim from critics, and appeared on several lists of the best films of 1970. Among other accolades, it won the David di Donatello for Best Film, the Sutherland Trophy, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The cinematography, by Vittorio Storaro, was also highly praised and launched his international career.[4]

Retrospective reviews have been equally positive, both towards the film's cinematic merits as well as its political content.[5] The film was highly influential towards later works, including Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy,[6] and has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time.[7][8]

In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."[9]

In 1938 Paris, Marcello Clerici finalises his preparations to assassinate his former college professor, Luca Quadri, leaving his wife Giulia in their hotel room. After receiving a call, Marcello is picked up in a car driven by his subordinate, Special Agent Manganiello.

A series of flashbacks depict Marcello discussing with his blind friend Italo his plans to marry, his attempts to join the Fascist secret police, and his visits to his parents in Rome: a morphine-addicted mother at the family's decaying villa, and his father at an insane asylum.

In a flashback to 1917, Marcello is a boy who is humiliated by his schoolmates until he is rescued by Lino, a chauffeur. Lino shows him a pistol and then makes sexual advances towards Marcello. He partially responds to them before grabbing the pistol and shooting into the walls and into Lino. He then flees, believing he committed a murder.

In another flashback, Marcello and Giulia discuss the necessity of his going to confession, even though he is an atheist, in order for her Roman Catholic parents to allow them to marry. Marcello agrees and, in confession, admits to the priest to have committed several sins, including his homosexual intercourse with and subsequent murder of Lino, premarital sex, and his absence of guilt for these sins. Marcello admits he thinks little of Giulia but craves the normality that a traditional marriage with children will bring. The priest is shocked but absolves Marcello once he hears that he is working for the Fascist secret police.

In Ventimiglia, Marcello meets with Fascist officer Raoul, who orders him to assassinate Professor Quadri, an outspoken anti-Fascist intellectual now living in exile in France. Using his honeymoon as a cover, he takes Giulia to Paris where he can carry out the mission.

While visiting Quadri, Marcello falls in love with Anna, the professor's wife, and pursues her. Although she and her husband are aware of Marcello's dangerous Fascist sympathies, she responds to his advances and forms a close attachment to Giulia, towards whom she also makes sexual advances. Giulia and Anna dress extravagantly and go to a dance hall with their husbands, where Marcello's commitment to the Fascists is tested by Quadri. Manganiello is also there, having been following Marcello for some time and doubtful of his intentions. Marcello secretly returns the gun that he has been given and gives Manganiello the location of Quadri's country house in Savoy, where the couple plan to go the following day.

Even though Marcello has warned Anna not to go to the country with her husband, she makes the car journey nevertheless. On a deserted alpine road, Fascist agents fatally stab Quadri as Anna watches in horror. When the men turn their attention to her, she runs to the car behind for help. When Anna sees that the passenger in the back seat of the car is Marcello and realises his betrayal, she begins to scream, before running into the woods to escape the agents. Marcello watches as she is pursued through the woods and shot to death. Manganiello walks away from the car for a cigarette, disgusted with what he sees as Marcello's cowardice in not shooting Anna when she ran to their car.

In 1943, amidst Benito Mussolini's resignation and the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, Marcello now has a daughter with Giulia and is apparently settled in a conventional life. While walking on the streets of Rome one night, Marcello and Italo overhear a conversation between two men; Marcello recognises one of them as Lino, who survived Marcello's attack. Marcello publicly denounces Lino as a Fascist, homosexual and the murderer of the Quadris. In his frenzy, he also denounces Italo as a Fascist. As an anti-Fascist crowd sweeps past, taking Italo with them, Marcello sits near a small fire and stares behind him at the young man Lino had been talking to, now naked on a bed.

The film is a case study in the psychology of conformism and fascism: Marcello Clerici is a bureaucrat, cultivated and intellectual but largely dehumanized by an intense need to be "normal" and to belong to whatever is the current dominant socio-political group. He grew up in an upper class, perhaps dysfunctional family, and he suffered a major childhood sexual trauma and gun violence episode in which he long believed (erroneously) that he had committed a murder. He accepts an assignment from Benito Mussolini's secret police to assassinate his former mentor, living in exile in Paris. In Trintignant's characterization, Clerici is willing to sacrifice his values in the interests of building a supposedly "normal life".[10]

According to the political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos, "This psychological need to conform and be 'normal' at the social level, in general, and the political level, in particular, was beautifully portrayed" by The Conformist, as well as Eugne Ionesco's 1959 play Rhinoceros.[11]

According to the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, the film is widely praised as a visual masterpiece. It was photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who used rich colours, authentic wardrobe of the 1930s and a series of unusual camera angles and fluid camera movement. Film critic and author Robin Buss wrote that the cinematography suggests Clerici's inability to conform with "normal" reality: the reality of the time is "abnormal".[12] Also, Bertolucci's cinematic style synthesises expressionism and "fascist" film aesthetics. Its style has been compared with classic German films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).[13]

In 2013, Interiors, an online journal concerned with the relationship between architecture and film, released an issue that discussed how space is used in a scene that takes place on the Palazzo dei Congressi. The issue highlights the use of architecture in the film, pointing out that in order to understand the film itself, it is essential to understand the history of the EUR district in Rome and its deep ties with fascism.[14]

The Conformist was filmed in locations throughout Rome and Paris.[15] Roman locations included the Palazzo dei Congressi, the Museum of the Ara Pacis, Sant' Angelo Bridge, Santa Marinella, the Theatre of Marcellus and the Colosseum. Parisian locales included Gare d'Orsay, Palais de Chaillot, and Joinville-le-Pont. The studio scenes were filmed at Cinecitt.

Bertolucci, production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro made heavy use of the 1930s art and dcor associated with the Fascist era: the middle-class drawing rooms and the huge halls of the ruling elite.[6][12] The EUR district of Rome, which was commissioned by Benito Mussolini as a model city, and its rationalist architecture serves as one of the film's key locations.[16]

Lead actor Trintignant learned his Italian-language lines phonetically, and per common practice in the Italian film industry at the time, was later dubbed over by another actor, Sergio Graziani.[17][18][19] Other actors in the dub cast included Arturo Dominici, Rita Savagnone, Giuseppe Rinaldi and Lydia Simoneschi.[20]

Bertolucci's first choices to play Giulia and Anna were Florinda Bolkan and Brigitte Bardot, but the former was busy shooting The Last Valley, and the latter disliked the script. Anouk Aime was offered a role.

The soundtrack composed by Georges Delerue was originally released on LP in Italy in February 1971 by Cinevox.[21] On 5 February 2013, Music Box Records released a limited edition of the soundtrack on CD, containing 15 previously unreleased songs.[21][22][23]

The film premiered at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival on 1 July 1970,[24] where it competed for the Golden Bear. However, due to a controversy surrounding the participation of Michael Verhoeven's anti-war film o.k., the festival was closed down three days later and no prizes were awarded.[25]

The film had a staggered release in Italy, opening in major cities in the early months of 1971: Milan on 29 January, Turin on 5 February and Rome on 25 March, for example.[26] In the United States, the film screened at the New York Film Festival on 18 September 1970[27] and was given a limited release in select cities the following spring, opening in New York and Los Angeles in April 1971,[28][29] and Chicago and Washington, D.C., in May 1971.[30][31] The first American release of the film was trimmed by five minutes compared to the Italian release; the missing scene features a group of blind people having a dance. They were restored in the 1996 reissue.[32]

Vincent Canby, film critic for The New York Times, praised Bertolucci's screenplay and his directorial effort, and wrote, "Bernardo Bertolucci ... has at last made a very middle-class, almost conventional movie that turns out to be one of the elegant surprises of the current New York Film Festival. ... It is also apparent in Bertolucci's cinematic style, which is so rich, poetic, and baroque that it is simply incapable of meaning only what it says ... The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film, at least in Europe where there always seems to be a market for intelligent, upper middle-class decadence."[27]

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