The Conformist

[Sloper]

Apparently, Bertolucci planned to use the same linear narrative structure as the novel, but realised during filming that it might be more interesting to break the timeline up; hence he shot lots of material for the car ride with Manganiello, so he could use this as the frame for the various flashbacks. In a way, the film could almost be called The Passenger, and like Antonioni's film it's about a man striving to be what he is not - as matrix put it - and giving over his agency to larger forces.

The most interesting use of the flashback technique occurs when Manganiello tells Clerici that Anna cannot be saved: far from coming to her rescue, they're going to play an entirely passive, voyeuristic role, watching as the inevitable slaughter plays out. When Clerici realises this, he insists on getting out of the car, walks for a few seconds while Manganiello drives alongside him, then signals him to stop so he can get back in. This triggers the memory of being bullied by a circle of children while adults stood by and watched, then of signalling Lino to stop the car, watching the children from the rear windscreen, being sexually abused by Lino, and then (supposedly) shooting him dead (some of these details are interspersed with the beautifully shot confession scene in the church). Exiting the car is a desperate attempt to escape his passive role; but getting into Lino's car sealed his fate at an early age, dooming him to a life in which he can make no meaningful decisions, so now, echoing that fateful act, he asks the car to stop and gets back in.

Or perhaps the point is that there are only two roads open to him: either he gets abused and victimised, as he was by the children and by Lino, while others watch callously from the sidelines; or he watches callously from the sidelines himself, races ahead (pursuing his career with the fascists) while everyone else is left behind, and abuses and kills other people. It's understandable that the latter course seems the more viable to him, but neither one entails any kind of self-fulfilment. No wonder he seems so emotionless when he watches Anna being killed: as far as he knows, that's his role in this situation, to be the passive one on the 'safe' side of the window, watching somebody else being destroyed. His only reaction is to jump when he hears the first gunshot – an instinctive, self-interested fear, not an expression of concern for Anna. Of course, finding out that the memory he's always felt so defined by was not entirely accurate - that Lino didn't die - disrupts this formula of the two available paths, and perhaps opens up a new, less passive way of approaching life.

In the scene with the father, Marcello wants to reassure himself that he's fated, almost by birth, to be a tool of the fascists. He seems to see his father's insanity as a sort of cowardly state of denial, induced by guilt. He has no intention of losing his mind like this; he will just passively accept this role that has been imposed on him.

[Kat]

I saw the film two or three years ago on the big screen and have just watched the arrow dvd. I haven't watched the commentary yet. I have not read the book. I didn't vote for it, went for the Long Goodbye.

I agree with lots of what has been said and only want to add to that really. I do think that more is suggested for his motivation than his apparent experience of abuse. We have his relationship with his mother and as Sloper says with his father who is depicted as 'mad' (whatever that is, it was quite a stereotypical depiction, though I guess one well known at that time). His embrace of the prostitute who says she is mad i found a very authentic aspect of him -- and the knowing way he is tempted into this by the agent very chilling.
Now I think I'm most struck by his conformity as a mask that hides his uncertainty of who he is. As others have suggested he has a rich experience, yet consistently turns to the certainties of fascism. In many ways I saw this as an issue of language, that in some way he is disconnected from the language but uses it as a mask -- but it goes beyond that to self indeed. In this way he contrasts sharply with Manganiello, a very different man who makes it very clear what he thinks of him at the murders (to the audience anyway). I did feel there was a fatalism to him on that car journey and I think his inability to act was consistent with what we knew of him - and given that difficulty of knowing what he wants, is it any surprise that he'd want to conform as he does not know who he is otherwise. But he seems to speak words without wholly being committed to them.

In a way it seems to me he does not know how to trust love and choose it - and we see plenty of reasons for that.

The murder of Anna, who sees him in the car, the man with her only hours before, I find very powerful from that point of view. Maybe it also works more generally in challenging passivity to such violence, and so also challenging viewers.

At the end he's clearly shown in warm colours/light when he looks at the boy. This may suggest that he's repressed himself. But I agree I don't think it is making that case generally of fascism. For me he's a person with conflicting feelings and in this crisis -- having just faced his possible abuser who is not dead, as his actions are falling about his ears, he's reconnected to feeling something. Maybe he is gay -- or maybe this man that looks for answers in words and definitions and fits himself to them, in the ruins of the path he's taken will find a valid way of making sense of all this by fitting himself to being another idea of himself, the opposite of what he'd tried previously and again going with the flow of who he meets and the ambiguous feelings he has (and that is not a general comment by me on being lgbt). Or maybe he will suddenly release his authentic self that no one could show him to do previously and which he'd not found a way to allow? -- or maybe it could be a step towards that.

Overall, at the moment, I see it as a film that argues for a need to commit to love (and to be shown love to learn how to), to understanding ourselves (and the ambiguity of feeling beyond simple definitions) and which may help us face challenges - personal, social, political. It is beautiful and horrific but it is not a film I think I love -- it may be due to its perfection, and his perfection that for all his ambiguous feelings he doesn't get into dialogue with another about at all, but that may be my own wishful thinking and in that it may be very realistic. He does seem to be committed to his denial of those feelings unless they give him the answer he wants.

[matrixschmatrix]

Sloper, I like your idea of him as someone who was in childhood put into the position of dividing the world between victim and victimizer- his own abuse on the one side, his presumed experience of murder on the other- and therefore chooses, against his nature and against any moral sense he has (which does appear to be there, if only in the animal form of skittishness and anxiety) to side with the victimizers- the frightened quality Trigntinant brings to the role, the physicality of it, has a quality of an abused kid trying to be hard. The link to fascism, then, is not in his personal character or choices, but in the result of society acting in an abusive role- it eliminates modes of existing outside of one end of boot or the other.

I think that also answers why communists, or anyone else capable of meaningfully resisting the fascists, cannot exist within the movie- the moral quandary lies in Quadri, and especially Anna, being people who do not resist at all, and therefore ask Trintignant to re-enact the sort of ugliness that seems to be a defining quality in what he fears, what he's hiding inside himself- he has to destroy something helpless. A fair fight, or a dialog with anyone capable of putting one up (as Quadri's students seem they might be) cannot be allowed to exist in his worldview until it is annihilated all at once at the end of the war.

[Kat]

It occurs to me that the Quadri's deliberately show him love and the possibility of acceptance despite knowing what he is - and it'd due to his personal psychology that he cannot commit to this, choose to stand with it. I like the point about choosing to stand with the victimisers, their certainty, that being what he has learned when victimised and also due to the absence of a clear stance with his parents. The trying to be hard thing i'd see as believing the choices he has as he understands them and not feeling other possibility, in fact its hardly a choice for him at all.

But what the Quadri's offer is the true resistance.

matrixschmatirx you also mention his skittishness which I remember being more struck with when i saw it on the big screen - the ways his stance can suddenly seem comic...his walk at times, when he skips up the steps after turning the agent on Trees, the way he goes into the office at the train stopover, there's a childishness to this and maybe more. On that first viewing I also noticed more the times he finds himself in salute and has to put his hand down, not just in Quadri's office, a comic touch of finding himself this thing without having really chosen it, but at the same time realising he might suddenly be seen for having committed to something and so hiding it where it may not be welcome.

[Calvin]

Stefania Sandrelli will present a new restoration at Il Cinema Ritrovato next month

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Does anybody (maybe tenia?) know anything about the blu-ray that was just released by Colored Films in France? https://www.dvdfr.com/dvd/f169404-conformiste.html

Is it the new restoration or one of the older problematic ones?