#120
Post
by Sloper » Fri Feb 03, 2017 4:36 pm
Well I didn't vote for it. I really hated it when I first saw it - it struck me as an irritating, empty fireworks display of cinematographic tricks, in the service of a story whose point (insofar as I could see any point in it) seemed totally fatuous.
Watching it again for the purpose of this discussion, I suddenly fell in love with it. The fragmented flashbacks-within-flashbacks narrative structure, which confused me in a bad way on the first viewing, now made sense as a way of exploring how Clerici’s present, and his plans for the future, are defined by his past. He’s trying to break out of the ‘deviant’ identity forced upon him by others’ abuse and indifference in his youth, by joining the abusive and indifferent forces of his own day; but the resulting guilt, and the feelings of conflict induced by his attraction to Anna and admiration for Quadri (and contempt for Manganiello and Italo), are as inescapable as the damage he incurred as a child.
The absolutely breath-taking cinematography, art direction, costume design, etc., accentuate the feeling that this character is trapped in a giant, intricate, artificial construct – a cave full of shadows that have at best a tenuous connection to reality. My favourite scene in this respect is the one on the train when Clerici and Giulia are on honeymoon. It reminds me of the way colours and environments oppress Giuliana in Red Desert – the colour pink suffusing the hotel room to signify that she has given in and ‘become an unfaithful wife’. Here, the train carriage is suffused with an autumnal, romantic glow, then an even more romantic night-time blue as the consummation gets underway. Clerici deliberately mirrors the abusive lovemaking inflicted on 15-year-old Giulia by Perpuzio, to conform to this established patriarchal norm. Later, he rapes Anna in the same conformist spirit, forcing her to appease him with (largely feigned, I think) sexual interest. She hopes that this traditional form of bribery will save her and her husband. Anyway, I love how the film mobilises all the resources of cinema to both illustrate the workings of these oppressive norms and deconstruct their artificiality. Delerue’s music contributes a lot to these effects as well.
I also love the ambiguity of the film. Clerici is not demonised; Giulia is not nearly as stupid as she appears; Anna and Quadri are not idealised. The ending is especially thought-provoking in its openness. Clerici finds out that he never murdered Lino after all, so tries to put the responsibility for what he’s done since then onto Lino. He also tries to denounce Italo, who kick-started his career as a fascist. But these are not just cowardly, self-serving renunciations of responsibility. They’re not real denunciations, in fact: nobody who hears them could care less about Lino’s or Italo’s or Marcello’s crimes. When a marching crowd of people turn up who might actually lynch Italo if they knew about his past, Clerici says nothing. The crowd sweeps Italo up and carries him along, presumably to be assimilated into the rest of these blind optimists who can’t see that the bright future they’re looking forward to will be an illusion, another shadow on the wall of the cave.
Clerici is left alone in this desolate, antique subterranean place, still an outsider, still an underdog in spite of all his efforts. Meanwhile the young man on the steps has been listening to him with interest, and (as a cutaway told us a few minutes ago) has picked up on the fact that Celrici had a traumatic sexual encounter with Lino in the past. Now, this young man has taken off his clothes, lain down on his mattress and cranked up the gramophone: the song, ‘Come l’ombra’, addresses an exhausted shadow searching for love in the wrong places, urging it to avoid the sun that would obliterate it, insisting on the unknowability of the future and the brevity of youth. Clerici looks over his shoulder, like a prisoner in the cave looking at reality for the first time.
Insofar as the film is suggesting that fascism stems from repressed homosexuality, I guess I’d agree with lubitsch that that seems pretty dumb. However, I don’t see it as being about fascism as such (or at least not just about fascism), or about homosexuality as such. It’s about something more fundamental: what it means to ‘belong’ in a community, what it means to feel locked out of one, and what costs and sacrifices are required in either instance. The final shot cannot simply be boiled down to, ‘What do you know, I was gay all along’, although there is a sense here that Clerici is finally looking at the true object of his desire. Even Anna was a kind of artificial ideal, the archetypal romantic soulmate as opposed to Giulia’s archetypal pliable housewife – hence Anna appears three times in different costumes.
Yes, Clerici is looking over his shoulder, which is what Plato’s prisoners have to do in order to see the real world. But what he looks into is not the outside world, but another cave. In Quadri’s study, the discussion of Plato was ambiguous. Clerici remembered Quadri closing the windows of the lecture hall, blocking out the light so that all the students could hear was his voice. He seems to be suggesting that the lecture hall was like the cave, and Quadri’s voice the illusion they all believed in. There is something self-absorbed and pretentious about Quadri’s justification for leaving Italy (‘we wanted people to feel our disdain from afar, the historical meaning of our struggle as exiles’), and maybe Clerici is right to feel let down by the transience of this man’s ideals. I’m not sure there’s anything in the film that suggests otherwise, which is actually kind of surprising. There’s no real celebration of anti-fascist heroism, and the assassinations at the end are horrific, not heroic.
Back to the scene in the study: Clerici, in illustrating the Plato story, accidentally makes a fascist salute with his shadow; his shadow disappears when Quadri opens the window while saying that Clerici cannot possibly be a true fascist, given the way he talks. This is hard to untangle. Clerici accuses Quadri of causing him to become a fascist, by abandoning Italy; Quadri gets himself off the hook by denying that Clerici is a fascist at all, thereby asserting that no abandonment or betrayal has taken place. Like the shadow in the song at the end, Clerici’s is destroyed by sunlight. We might think this means that he is left standing alone in the light, forced to take responsibility for himself and for whatever he has become.
But what Clerici realises, and Quadri does not, is that the shadow is all he has, all that constitutes his identity. He may not be a fascist, but he isn’t anything else either. This is not so much because he is living a lie (and is therefore ‘all show and no substance’), as because he lives in shadows, in darkness, in concealment; behind screens, windows, windscreens (front and back), curtains, bars (note the rows and rows of sheets behind which Lino’s tiny bedroom is hidden), on thresholds. The shadow imagery in this film makes me think of Melville’s Army of Shadows, in which the ostensibly heroic resistance fighters end up as little more than shadows, struggling vainly against unstoppable odds and achieving nothing.
What Clerici faces up to at the end is not simply that he is gay, but that in every aspect of his being he will never be able to conform. Reality, for him, consists in the marginality and shadows of a small, hidden cave, outside which the profoundly fake ‘real world’ goes about its normalising business. He could never have enjoyed success or found fulfilment, either as a fascist or an anti-fascist. He has no ideological allegiance to give, no commitments to betray. I’m still not quite sure how to read the tone of the ending, but I think it mixes bleakness and hope. On the one hand, Clerici’s ‘real self’ will always be forced into the shadows by the society he lives in; on the other hand, the friendly young man and his gramophone indicate that the cave might not be such a lonely place after all – indeed, a lot less lonely than the crowd Italo just vanished into.
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Not crazy about Bertolucci making Trintignant hit that puppy. But Trintignant himself is, as always, amazing.