Over the past few years I have rarely gone to the cinema – the usual reasons: the vacuousness of Hollywood, the convenience and cheapness of dvd rentals, the irritating inability of the average movie-goer to follow a basic plotline without conducting an extended sotto voce conferral with everyone within three rows of him. The consequence is that I watch fewer films. Watching a film on the small screen is a stunted experience, with little of the potential for an absorbing, immersive experience that the big screen in the darkened room offers. The more I watch films on television, the less I feel motivated to watch any films, much less to walk into town and pay a tenner to see one. A vicious circle then, but one which could be broken by seeing a film that vividly expresses why the cinema is worthwhile.
A film, that is, such as the Conformist, which has been revived in a new print. It could technically be said to be showing at the IFI although it almost certainly won’t be by the time you read this post, or even by the time I finish writing it. Originally released in 1970, the Conformist was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci although it’s such a powerful film visually that much credit must go to his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. The shots are beautifully composed, with a dreamlike vividness that verges on the surreal, and the dense layers of symbolism add depth to a story that would otherwise be thin and unconvincing. Marcello Clerici is plagued by a profound sense of difference and exclusion, such that he is obsessed with attaining the invisibility of the unremarkable man. He marries a bourgeois woman of transcendental vapidity, he worms his way into work with the Fascist political police. He is devoid of moral compunction, seeking only to become one of the crowd. But of course he never can – Clerici fears and detests the crowd; he cannot stand the press of human flesh and even shies away from the hand of his closest friend, the blind radio announcer Italo who provides his entree to the Fascist apparat. (And one of the most striking images of the film is Italo in the studio, reading aloud a paean to the ruling party from a braille manuscript…the blind media as the unquestioning mouthpiece of the state.)
Clerici is sent to Paris to reactivate a relationship with (and ultimately to assassinate) his former philosophy professor, Quadri, now living in political exile in Paris. He has the convenient cover of his own honeymoon although this means bringing his new bride Giulia with him, which complicates matter further when he falls in love with Quadri’s wife, Anna. Anna in turn seems more interested in Giulia, though whether it’s genuine romantic interest or an attempt to attack Clerici whom she professes to despise. It could be a farce, but the recounting of the story through multiple levels of flashback while Clerici and his ox-like accomplice Manganiello drive through the snow-covered countryside to catch up with Quadri lends it the tone of a thriller. Which it is not quite, either – Quadri’s death by stabbing at the hands of a platoon of Fascists (echoing the murder of Julius Caesar) offers no climactic release. The film ends on a more sombre note, cutting forward to the night Mussolini’s abdication. Clerici and Italo, both thoroughly implicated in the fallen regime walk the streets. “I want to see how a dictatorship falls” he responds as Giulia begs him not to go outside. They are overtaken by a mob – Italo is swallowed up by it but Clerici somehow passes through it whole, and the film ends with his face seen through a barred gate in the flickering light of a fire, a mask of utmost despair.
The roots of Clerici’s difference are never fully explained. It is hinted that they reside in repressed homosexuality – Italo believes it, and the weight Clerici places on his childhood encounter with the chauffeur supports that. But then what to make of his powerful attraction to Anna? The difference seems to operate on a more existential level, a cinematic representation of the Sartre’s nausea. The panic on Clerici’s face as the dancers in the nightclub circle him ever more tightly speaks of a revulsion that is absolute. Seeing this film once is nowhere near enough to unpack everything contained in it, and new associations come to mind every time I think about it. It is a cavalcade of images that resonate at both conscious and subconscious levels. Today the shot that strikes me is that of Clerici’s father in the asylum, angrily flailing the untied sleeves of his straitjacket at his son before folding his arms and awaiting restraint at the hands of a burly nurse. Tomorrow it will be another, the day after that another still.
