Bernardo Bertolucci’s Anti-Fascism Classic Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant Returns to Blu-ray
DIRECTED BY BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI/1970
BLU-RAY STREET DATE: NOVEMBER 28, 2023/RARO VIDEO (VIA KINO LORBER)
In the short video below, David Blakeslee reviews Raro Video’s 2023 Blu-ray re-release (via Kino Lorber) of Bernardo Bertolucci’s highly regarded classic of 1970, The Conformist (Il conformista). David discusses the films and its themes, as well as providing a comparison and opinions on how the two Raro Blu-ray editions differ. Below the video you will find selections of David’s write-up on The Conformist, which followed his initial experience with the film. A longer version of the written piece originated as part of ZekeFilm’s 2022 ten-year anniversary “Film Admissions” initiative. That installment of “Film Admissions” (1970-1979) is linked at the bottom portion of this post.
Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the titular character, and he does so with skillful nuance, offering blank slate facial expressions under which a piercingly observant calculation can be detected as he maneuvers his way through an increasingly risky society, one inclined to using violence, paranoia, and extortion to keep citizens in line or eliminate those who fail to adhere to the dictates of the authorities. The recently-deceased actor, star of numerous features beloved by generations of cinephiles, considered this one of his favorite roles and I have to agree. His portrayal of Marcello Clerici is crucial to the success of the film but fortunately for everyone involved, he is surrounded by great talent in the casting and also the crew.
Clerici’s chosen path to normality leads him to take GiuIia as his wife (played by Stefania Sandrelli) who is young, beautiful, frivolous, and sexually playful – a winning combination for a man seeking to ingratiate himself to the arbiters of public approval, even though he often seems disinterested in or perhaps even repulsed by her, at least in their private encounters. As circumstances lead up to their wedding and honeymoon, he’s also taken into the confidence of a secretive police force dedicated to punishing opponents of Mussolini’s regime. He draws the assignment of assassinating one of his former professors, an anti-Fascist intellectual who now lives in exile in Paris, having fled Rome when the political tide turned against him. Clerici’s good standing with the professor is seen as an easy entrée into his inner circle that will give the ex-student an opportunity to assassinate his instructor and move him into a position of favor with the Fascist authorities – and presumably, that much closer to a normal and prosperous sense of himself.
Clerici’s character puts up resistance to external analysis and remains an impenetrable mystery even to his own self-inquiry as to why he stands so aloof and indifferent to the miseries experienced by others – miseries that he himself sometimes has an active role in inflicting. The film provides some evidence as to what might have messed him up early on in life – he’s a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who committed a violent act on his assailant – but I think it would overstate the case to draw too linear a connection between that traumatic incident and Clerici’s passive indifference and cruelty as an adult. Still, it’s not too difficult to envision uncountable legions of Clericis drifting through life at this very moment, sensing that insurmountable gap between themselves and their fellow humans, and capable of just about anything demanded of them by the powers that be if those demands are accompanied by an illusory promise that they would at last “fit in” and take their place in “normal” society. Though the film itself never lapses into anything that I would regard as a didactic sermonette, The Conformist does challenge viewers to dig into our own being and personhood to strengthen that core of awareness and substance that enables us to recognize the temptations, understand the costs, and resist the allures of violent totalitarian solutions to the problems we all face.