Europe Endless - The Mediterranean: The Conformist (Dir Bernardo Bertolucci, 1h56m, 1970)

We reach Italy. Much like France, there is an embarrassment of cinematic riches we could consider: we have already spent a month in Rome in previous years, and the impact of Italian Neorealism, Sword and Sandal, Spaghetti Westerns etc on the rest of European cinema cannot be understated, whilst directors from Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini to Sergio Leone and Pier Paolo Pasolini to Luca Guadagnino and Paolo Sorrentino have carried the banner for their nation's considerable cinematic profile. 

Alongside France, this was the hardest nation to pin down - the Italian themselves have had quite a concerted go at narrowing down their nation's phenomenal cinematic output to a mere 100 films, the Cento film italiani da salvare (A hundred Italian films to be saved). Yet, here we are, with Bernardo Bertolucci, a figure successful in both his native Italy, and abroad, with the infamous Last Tango in Paris (1972), the colossal The Last Emperor (1987), and The Sheltering Sky (1990) joining the films made in his native Italy.

Of these, The Conformist (Il conformista, 1970), adapted from Alberto Moravia's novel, is perhaps the best (and, incidently, on that list of 100 films to be saved) film in understanding the director; a noirish political drama in which Bertoluci's depiction of his nation's history (otherwise seen in 1900 (1976)), focuses around Marcello Clerici, an agent for the Italian Fascist Secret Police (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who is tasked with the assassination of his former professor, Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). Against this is Bertolucci's other key trademark, his depiction of romance and relationships for this stifled and bureaucratic figure, with Marcello's relationship with his newly married wife, Guilla (Stefania Sandrelli) and with the Professor's wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda). We are given glimpses of a man fractured, split between loyalty to the Party and individuality.

In the character of Marcello, Trintignant creates a man who is at once the perfect extension of the Party, and a willing one at that, and a figure in denial over what that entails - the metaphor cannot be overlooked, Bertolucci condemning the weak figure who goes along with the crowd and is disturbed at where he finds himself. His attempts to join the Secret Police, and the mission he is given, are illuminating, but it is the look behind this mask, this "perfect" Fascist, that depict the true Marcello, a man ill at ease with his upper-class upbringing, even as the film unravels his bourgeois parents to be in various states of mental illness, and the trauma of his youth in which he believes he shot a young man who made advances on him. As Bertolucci himself describes in a 2008 Guardian interview what drives Marcello is that "he wanted to hide and forget what he feels are his differences in his deep, deep consciousness."

Yet, around him are the trappings of the Italian Fascist Party - one of the first shots of the film is him pinning the lapel pin of the party onto his suit jacket . Marcello is keenly aware of his position, from his friends outward, and from his relationship with both his close friend, Italo (José Quaglio), and his accomplice, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) - who is often left trailing in his wake. At base, he has been seduced by the draw of fascism not just because it is easy but because it is outright seductive - yet this seduction is not presented to us in linear form, but in media res, and in fragments, Bertolucci holding back the murder in retrospection as he instead considers all of the elements, the formation of the man we know as Marcello - underneath the trappings of fascism he is nothing. At one point, confronting his former mentor, Quadri, this hollowness is laid bare, the allegory of Plato's cave painting the fascists that he has embraced as little more than the unenlightened, watching the shadows pass. 

We see this fragmentary nature best in the figure of Guilla who is little more than an extension of his connection to the Party - in fact, she is practically a stand-in for his inability to consider why he has thrown his lot in with the fascists, a woman lacking complexity, whose domesticity, whose shallowness is a perfect accessory; where her relationship with Marcello is purely physical, her tastes, seen in a sequence where she window-shops with Anna that of the typical bourgeois. In short, she represents the attempts to conform is to be another party member. Against this is the figure of Anna, the intellectual, the threat to the simplistic view of Fascist Italy that at once wrongfoots and seduces the hapless Marcello. It is this divide that creates the narrative heft of the film, and it not only permeates the plot of the film but its very texture.

It is the look of The Conformist that is most arresting: the first moments of it, in which Marcello wakes, dresses and prepares for his mission in his hotel not only indicate the non-linear nature of the film, the final actions before the assassination, but are harshly lit in red. Before Trintignant says a word, there is a sense of danger, of violence. Through the lens of Vittorio Storaro, a fixture of Bertolucci's work, and among other things, the chief cinematographer for Apocalypse Now (1979), the fractured identity extends out from Marcello to encapsulate the society he inhabits. For all the violence that Marcello inflicts or threatens, this is an undeniably beautiful film as we travel from tottering mansion to stark, Greek-theatre-aping asylum, across Europe to the inevitable denouement. 

Thus, what we see is at once hyper-stylised and impressionistic with much of the film shot in saturated colours, from deep reds to clinical white marble, the latter often accompanying the real-life fascist architecture - the brutal coldness of the Palazzo dei Congressi and the Mussolini-era jut of the EUR district of Rome - not to mention the evocative sunset that blooms at the train window as Marcello and Guilla passionately embrace. Small wonder Coppola's The Godfather (1973) pays unabashed homage to it, openly lifting its shot of tumbling autumn leaves.  Yet even here this beauty is capturing the spectre of Fascism by evoking the very visual iconography - the cinematic language is that of German expressionism and the overt propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl. 

It is a film about a man striving to be "normal", who finds himself a cog in the fascist machine. It is a film of great beauty, depicting a period that was anything but beautiful; yet, the impact of The Conformist, in linking together Italian Arthouse and the burgeoning New Hollywood, may make it one of the most influential Italian films of the period. It is a film that is at once great and frightening in its depiction of the banality of evil.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

The Conformist is available for streaming from Curzon and available on BluRay from Arrow Films

Next week, our final stop as we arrive in Spain and consider The Spirit of the Beehive's depiction of a girl's childhood under Franco.

The interview with Bertolucci can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/22/1