Abnormal to a Fault

By * J.C.

The Conformist is a threnody to an era and a political regime, Mussolini's Italy. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, the film reproduces the Italy and France of the 1930s with almost operatic splendor; no recent film has been so visually lush or stylistically exhilarating. It is a pity that the scenario cannot quite meet the demands of the mise en scene.

Writer-Director Bernardo Bertolucci, 30, the prodigy of Italian cinema who made an impressive American debut seven years ago with his Before the Revolution, has added a lot of panache to Moravia's book but lost much of its psychological strength. Marcello (lean-Louis Trintignant), the film's protagonist, is a rigidly "normal" young man who marries and joins the Fascists for the same reason--to conform. His passion for convention is the ill-fitting mask he wears to cover his own moral corruption. While he was a young boy, he was the victim of an attempted seduction by the family chauffeur (Pierre Clementi); Marcello killed the chauffeur accidentally while playing with a pistol. Marcello has passed the rest of his life trying to stifle the image of the incident, but it haunts him.

The Fascists dispatch him to France to kill one of his former college professors, and he combines the assignment with a honeymoon trip for his addled bride (Stefania Sandrelli). The meeting with his instructor and an intense assignation with the professor's wife (Dominique Sanda), reinforce his cynicism but weak en his homicidal resolve. The killing must be carried out by others while Marcello huddles in the back seat of a car, staring blankly at the slaughter.

Bertolucci breaks up the chronological flow of the narrative, preferring to let images and scenes occur to the audience more or less as they do to Marcello. A flash forward near the film's end puts Marcello in the last night of Mussolini's regime, wandering the streets in confusion. He overhears two homosexuals flirting and turns to confront the chauffeur he thought he had murdered. But the only thing Marcello had really murdered was an accurate memory of the incident. There was no killing. The last scene finds him confronting his nature for the first time as the other homosexual makes an advance to him.

This denouement is glib and unsatisfactory, intimating that the source of all Marcello's problems is a long-suppressed homosexuality. Bertolucci has said that the parading band of Communists who jostle Marcello in the last scene are intended to suggest "the wave of the future." But that symbol, juxtaposed with the homosexuality episode, creates confusion where there should be revelation, and will leave audiences more or less where it leaves Marcello: nowhere. There is some other rather lumpish and facile symbolism throughout the film that Bertolucci's virtuosity can only partially disguise.

Trintignant's characterization is studiously and acceptably stern. But Bertolucci works the kind of terrible cruelty on his actresses that hasn't been seen since The Damned, a film to which The Conformist bears several other unhappy resemblances. Women in this film are either stooges (like Marcello's wife) or succubi (like the professor's), corrupted or ripe for corruption. They only serve to accentuate the film's air of perfumed decadence.

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