The Conformist

Judged on the film as released in 1970, without the dance of the blind. The frame makes the structure purposeful: every return to the past is summoned by the drive, and the drive is the act the past has prepared. What resists the subtractive test is the core: the memory of Lino, the confession, the professor’s study, the dance hall, the wood. Each is required, and the end of the frame pays all of it. The test bites elsewhere. The visit to the mother’s villa and the visit to the father in the asylum are each a set piece of decadence carrying one idea, and either could lose half its length. The radio studio and the long betrothal scene run on charm. The coda is necessary in idea and contrived in mechanism: Lino, believed dead, turns up the same night in the same street. The dance of the blind, where restored, adds a scene whose motif is already carried.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: the fascist is made not by conviction but by the wish to be like everyone, and that wish covers a self the man cannot bear. Marcello wants a normal life, a mediocre wife, a church wedding and a post, and he will help kill his old teacher to have them; he joins the regime to be indistinguishable. The film shows this in image as much as in word: a small man in the vast empty halls of the ministry, placed and ruled by the architecture he serves. The coda adds the truest stroke, a crowd changing masters overnight and Marcello with it. Held at the bar because the cause offered is a Freudian schema, the childhood seduction, the shot and the guilt, which explains the man too neatly and the politics too little.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Elevation recurs, and it is mostly cold and dreadful. The murder in the wood is one of the great passages of its decade: the car stopped on the road, the agents coming out of the trees, the professor stabbed by many hands, Anna running to Marcello’s window and beating on it while he sits, then her flight through the snow, the hand-held camera chasing her until the shots. The dance hall reaches the other pole: Anna and Giulia dancing together, then a floor of dancers joining hands in a line that winds round Marcello and closes on him. Between them come the hotel room under the flashing red sign, the leaves blown across the ministry, the train with the landscape behind the couple washed in changing light, and Delerue’s score, lyrical where the images are not. Held short of the top because the Roman middle is often decorative, rising to style rather than height.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The myth is built, and what is built is the cave. Plato’s allegory is told in the professor’s study and then made the film’s governing figure: light and shadow, sight and blindness, prisoners who take the image for the thing. Italo is blind, and the regime broadcasts through his voice. Marcello is the man in the cave, and the coda leaves him by firelight in a vault of ancient Rome, looking back into the dark. Beside it stands the killing of the father: the professor was his teacher, the real father is locked in an asylum, and the murder in the wood, with many knives, takes the shape of Caesar’s. The particular stays particular: a hat, a wedding ring, a hotel in 1938. Held at the bar, not above, because the Oedipal and Platonic frames are applied a little by thesis, and the film names its myth in a lecture before it builds it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is double: the Italian political cinema of the 1960s, with neorealism behind it, and Godard, Bertolucci’s master, whose manner his previous film Partner (1968) had followed into failure. The turn is real and sharp. Against Godard’s essayism and the austerity of political film, Bertolucci made a lush, composed historical picture of the fascist past, with a star cast, an art deco world built by Scarfiotti and a colour design by Storaro in which light carries argument; and he broke the historical film’s straight line into one drive and a disordered memory. The stake was smaller than the turn: an international co-production, a famous novel, and a return to narrative after a failure. What holds the axis a tenth below the bar is the direction of the swerve, which is toward classical pleasure, and partly back from risk.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Marcello is made of what he cannot face. The past arrives in the order of his mind on the drive, not the order of events, and the shot of 1917 comes late, as a man’s buried cause comes late. The image composes him: framed small in giant rooms, cut by shadow and blinds, tilted when his world is false. The camera leaves its rule only in the wood, where the hand-held flight of Anna breaks the order he serves at the moment it kills. The architecture of the regime, its empty halls, is the political argument made into space, and the cave is not only told but lit. Held below the top because the flashback frame, once established, is used conventionally in the middle, and the coda stands outside the form rather than completing it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over fifty-six years. The film has kept several lines of reading open. Its psychology of fascism and of the conformist is still argued. Its sexual reading runs from the Freudian explanation it offers to a queer reading that takes Marcello’s horror of himself, rather than his desire, as the subject, and it keeps open Anna’s ambiguous attraction to Giulia. It is read as an allegory of Bertolucci and Godard, father and son; against Moravia, whose novel’s fate and religion it thins into psychology; and as a formal study, continuously, since Storaro’s work became a school text. On return the image yields rhymes: the leaves, the blinds, the hat, the ring, the cave. Held at its figure because its thesis is legible on first viewing, and much of the writing about it admires its look rather than finding new meaning.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1970s, which it opens. The intrinsic force is high. It showed that the art film could take the political past in the full means of spectacle, with design, colour and light as the vehicle of thought; that the historical film could be told through a mind’s disordered memory; and that a filmmaker of the Godard generation could return to classical form without losing his modernity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide among makers, and long. Storaro’s light carried on to Apocalypse Now (1979) and much else, Scarfiotti’s design to Scarface (1983), and Bertolucci’s own Last Tango in Paris and 1900 follow from it. Held at the bar because the reach lay in style and craft more than in what films set out to know, and it reached the public less than it reached its makers.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-six years. The form survives whole as a recording; its versions differ by one short scene, the dance of the blind, and the restored versions, one of them supervised by Storaro, are repair, with the colour, which is the film, carefully restored. Presence has been unbroken among those who study film, in repertory screenings, restorations and teaching. But the film was long hard to see in the English-speaking world, and its public presence has never been wide; that narrowness sets the axis below the usual figure for its span. The fabric ages little, since a film of the 1930s made in 1970 does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its colour now reads as 1970 too. The bar is cleared by a tenth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Read against the anchors every desk shares, near the top and below it. The making is load-bearing throughout. Storaro’s light divides the film: cold blue and grey in Rome, warmer and freer in Paris, the last colour drained to snow, and every scene has a lighting idea that serves the argument. Scarfiotti’s sets and the architecture found for them make the regime a space. Arcalli’s cutting carries the chronology, so that the drive and the past interleave without confusion. Delerue’s score gives the film the tenderness its hero lacks. Trintignant’s Marcello, stiff, watchful and rigid in his walk, is a performance of a man acting normal; Sanda’s Anna and Sandrelli’s Giulia are each exact in a different register. The costs fall on small shares: Giulia is played broad in her first scenes, the sound at times sits loose on the picture, and the asylum and the mother’s villa are design before drama.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Giulia in a striped dress in light striped by the blinds, listing her confessions as comedy, and Anna’s death in the snow. One law governs both: Marcello watches and does not act, and the world is arranged to be looked at by a man who will not see it. The comedy of the wedding preparations and the terror of the wood are lit and framed by the same rule of composition, and the cave holds from the lecture to the last firelight. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to murder, and from dream to the documentary look of the crowd of 1943. The strain lies in two places: the decadence of the mother and the father runs on a broader satirical law than the rest, and the coincidence of Lino in the coda breaks the film’s psychological physics for a schematic one.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what a feature of under two hours holds. The state, in the ministry, the secret police and its agents; history, in 1917, 1938 and 1943, the regime at its height and at its fall, and the exiles in Paris; the family, in a decayed mother, a mad father and a marriage made for normality; sexuality, in the childhood trauma, Anna’s attraction to Giulia and Marcello’s to Anna; the sacred, in a confession Marcello uses as he uses everything; thought, in Plato and the professor; and consciousness, in Marcello’s memory, which is the form. The plot integrates them: the wedding, the honeymoon and the murder are one journey. What holds the axis lowest: labour and the people appear only as a crowd in the coda and a street singer, Anna and the professor have no interior, and the politics is reduced to one man’s psychology.

Score: 8.1 / 10