The Conformist (1970)

"I want to see how a dictatorship falls.”

I’ve always hated unthinking confirmity so, as you can imagine, I found this film rather satisfying. It may be adapted from a novel I don’t know, but it’s rare to find a film that feels so much like literary fiction in its treatment of theme and inferiority, an impressive achievement when one must use visuals and acting as a substitute to being privy to characters’ thoughts.

Marcello Clerici is cold, reserved, not given to easy display of feeling, perhaps because of sexual abuse in his youth, and self-conscious about this, as well as secretly not being quite unambiguously heterosexual. But this very self-consciousness makes him anxious to fit in, to be “normal”, an attitude he shares with his blond friend Italo.

So he conforms. Even his marriage to Giulia, while he sees as rather simple and with whom he has no real connection as a person, is done so he can appear normal. The trouble is, of course, that confirmity can be a particularly terrible thing if you happen to live in an oppressive society such as, say, Fascist Italy in 1938, and the film centres on a moral dilemma; will Marcello get his hands dirty by assassinating an old anti-Fascist professor? In the end he does, of course, and he conforms to Fascism and tyranny in all of its openly evil aspects.

His relationship with Anna is interesting, too. The professor’s wife, yet also attracted to both Marcello and the innocently oblivious Giulia, she seems to offer her body as a peace offering to Marcello in a doomed attempt to stave off the inevitable. Yet she is attracted to the man she hates, accepting sex and comfort from him even as she confronts him with human rights abuses under Mussolini.

And yet, five years later, as Mussolini’s regime falls, Marcello is able to conform once more without a qualm, denouncing his former Fascist beliefs and even his old friend Italo, no doubt set to thrive in the new democratic Italy. Such conformists surround us, their potential for evil often latent, but they are monsters. This is a fine film.