seeking normality
by Douglas Messerli
Bernardo
Bertolucci (screenplay, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, and director) Il conformista (The Conformist) / 1970
Prismatically
told, mostly in flashbacks, Bertolucci’s great film The Conformist is a devastatingly complex and ironic work about Fascism—both
Mussolini’s Italian version and fascism in general—focused upon the figure of
Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant). From the very beginning of the film,
Marcello admits to a priest that he is marrying a course, bourgeoisie woman in
order to gain “normality”:
marrying a petty bourgeois.
Confessor: Then she must be a fine girl.
Giulia: Speak out. Go ahead.
Marcello: Mediocre. A mound of petty ideas. Full
of pettt ambitions. She’s all bed and kitchen.
And
with his friend, Italo (José Quaglio), he reiterates the connection between the
petty bourgeois and fascism:
Italo: A normal man? For me, a normal man is one
who turns his head to see a beautiful woman’s
bottom. The point is not just to turn your head.
There are five or six reasons. And he is glad to
find people who are like him, his equals. That’s
why he likes crowded beaches, football, the
bar downtown….
Marcello: At Piazza Venice.
Italo: He likes people similar to himself and does not
trust those who are different. That’s why a normal
man is a true brother, a true
citizen, a true patriot…
Marcello: A truce fascist.
Yet, as the Fascist head rightly
perceives, Marcello is not at all a “normal” man. His father, living in Munich,
took him to a bierstube as a child, in which “a nutty man” spoke about
politics. “They’d buy him beer and encourage him. He’d stand up on the table
making furious speeches. It was Hitler.” As an adult, the father is committed to
an insane asylum.

Marcello’s mother lives in a decaying
villa, where she is having an affair with her chauffeur, who brings her
morphine to maintain her drug addiction.

By bits and pieces, through memories and
confessions, Marcello reveals that as a child he was not only abused by local
boys, but sexually accosted by another family chauffeur, Lino (Pierre Clémenti).
After the sexual event, the child, Marcello, grabs the accoster’s gun and
shoots him, believing he has killed him.
If
Bertolucci’s and Moravia’s psychological assumptions appear, at times, far too
simplistic, in the example of Marcello they become more complex simply because
he is a man caught between these two seeming extremes. Both a product of the
pre-war decadence and a man seeking moral simplicity, he cannot live in either
world. Throughout most of the film he is observed attempting to chase down and
save his new lover, Anna, Quadri’s wife; but when he finally catches up with
her, he is forced to become—at least, has no other choice than to remain—a
passive voyeur to the Professor’s and her deaths as Manganiello and other
Fascists chase them down, slashing them over and over again with knives.
Perhaps the most painful moment of the movie occurs when Anna, perceiving her
own danger, races from the car, hoping to be saved by the car following them,
wherein Marcello sits. Her former lover, however, will not even open the
window, as she turns in horror towards the woods, betrayed by the very man whom
she and the professor were convinced was far “too serious” to be serious.
At Mussolini’s downfall, we once again catch
up with Marcello, now a conventional Italian, with a wife and child. He has
been asked to meet with his old friend Italo—who we now recognize was another
exceptional being, in his blindness, of Marcello’s past. Guilia begs him not to
go out, fearful that, as a former Fascist, he will be in danger:
Giulia: What are you going to do now?
Marcello: The same as everyone else who thought
like me.When there are so many of us, there’s
no risk.
Giulia: Marcello, don’t go out. They could hurt you.
Marcello” I won’t be in danger. After all, what have
I done? My duty.
Giulia: But why do you want to go?
Marcello: I want to see how a dictatorship falls.
As he encounters his former friend, the
two overhear a conversation between a starving young man and an older man who
claims that at his house they have lots of provisions, quietly attempting to
seduce the boy with a gentle stroking of his foot. Suddenly Marcello recognizes
the older man: it is Lino, the chauffeur who made love to him. Like a
rhinoceros out of Eugène Ionesco’s dramatic fable Rhinoceros, Marcello roars out, defaming him as a Fascist, a
homosexual, a pervert—even turning upon Italo with his public declarations.
Both Lino and Italo race away into the
night, while the man who would have liked to have been a Fascist, a conformist,
one of the everyday men in life, remains, hovering against a street fire as he
stares into the face of the young boy Lino has left. Marcello is an outsider no
matter 
Bertolucci’s beautifully filmed fable,
recreating the costume and feeling of the time, alternatively engaging us in
subtle variations of rich color and cool black-and-white, has transformed Moravia’s
more polemic work into a rich tragic-comedy
in which Marcello comes to be seen, almost as in Fellini’s films, as a
well-suited clown, a man both at home and completely at odds with the world in
which lives.
Los Angeles,
January 4, 2013
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