So Deeply Empty: 'The Conformist' Revisited

It's odd what lasts and what doesn't. Not all of the great 1970 movie "The Conformist" lasts, for example, while the movie it most directly influenced, "The Godfather" of 1972, is still around, in toto.

Does this prove that Francis Ford Coppola was a better filmmaker than "Conformist's" Bernardo Bertolucci? No, it proves Coppola selected a better story, with classical meanings that, though rooted in time, remain forever fresh. Bertolucci, on the other hand, told a story that, though also rooted in time, was built of ephemeral theories of psychology and now seems somewhat gossamer.

"The Conformist" famously tries to explain the fascist impulse, and a newly restored version, with vivid colors and clean images, yields all the more opportunity for study. Derived from a novel by Alberto Moravia, it's a story of political violence, and how a man persuades himself to commit it. It's the story of an assassination, basically a psycho-biography of a terrorist.

Yet as a vessel of ideas, it's disappointing. Bertolucci connects the urge to political violence with some sort of desperate need to fit in, to be "normal," but it presupposes abnormality. His object of clinical examination is one Marcello Clerici (played by the handsome French blank Jean-Louis Trintignant), an uncomfortable child of the upper class. The time is 1938, and Marcello has given himself over to the cause of Mussolini. He is drawn by the imagery of power and strength, the power of mass action, the power of the mob that is Fascism as the Italians practiced it. He'll kill for it, not merely despite the moral considerations but also, as the movie dramatizes (horrifyingly) despite the emotional considerations. He'll let a woman he loves die, and he watches the hideous execution with an opaque face.

Bertolucci connects Marcello's willingness to do violence with a bizarre sexual experience in childhood. At the age of 10, Marcello was driven home from school one day after a rousing game of roughhouse in the park with the chauffeur that had evidently roused the man in more ways than one. When the driver (in his twenties) returns home with his charge, he invites the boy to come to his rooms in the Stygian darkness of the Clerici cellar. The lure is a pistol, and indeed the chauffeur had a pistol, an 1896 Mauser if you care. It happens to be -- how to say, how to say? -- a rather amazing, long-barreled, elegant weapon, and it quickly entrances the boy, who doesn't notice while playing with the gun that the chauffeur is making preparations to play with him. When he does notice, the boy grabs up the gun, and when the shooting is over, the chauffeur is apparently no longer among the living. The boy tries to flee but the door is locked and he can't get out.

That's when an errant puff of wind opens the window; the boy flees, and never says a word about what has happened and is evidently never blamed. But the scar -- according to Moravia, and then Bertolucci -- has been gouged into his mind: sex, violence, death, shame, escape. Somehow these tangled experiences provide him with a passionate need to fit in, to never be noticed, to yield to a totalitarian will.

That's fine, yes, fascism: sexual confusion, early association with violent death. The problem, of course, is that there were millions of fascists who were not molested by chauffeurs. They weren't molested by anybody. They just grew up looking for some crazed crusade to give themselves to, and when Der Fuehrer and Il Duce offered them one, off they went merrily, throwing bodies into the crematoria and machine-gunning civilians. But if you strip away the shallow intellectualizations of "The Conformist," you're left with something quite interesting: This is one of those things that might go into a very special drawer titled "Stupid . . . but Great." Others would be "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Triumph of the Will," maybe any great John Wayne western, and certainly the original of the genre, "The Birth of a Nation."

Its production is spectacular -- stylized in a way that expresses its dubious meaning brilliantly, it's superbly framed, performed, photographed and edited. The movie is pure magic as story, as drama, as photography, as conviction, as everything except its ideas. It feels, therefore, like a beautiful, even mesmerizing automobile -- dare we say Ferrari -- without an engine.

The childhood event is of course remembered in flashback. In the present, so ardent is Marcello to fit in that he's somehow made a connection to the secret police and they've found a use for him. It seems that during his college days he took a course from a renowned anti-fascist, Professor Quadri. Because Marcello knew Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), he can get close to him -- he's in exile in Paris -- and set up the killing. He's even given a pistol.

So Marcello goes to Paris with his wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), and a secret-police babysitter (Gastone Moschin). Using his connection, Marcello is immediately invited over and takes his wife -- she's a shallow representative of the bourgeoisie, more indication that Marcello, who doesn't love her, wants merely to fit in -- and meets the professor again as well as the professor's wife, played by Dominique Sanda in one of the iconographic '70s performances.

Sanda just takes the picture over, particularly as she commands the wan and pitiful Marcello. But she's also -- so hothothot! in '70 -- attracted to his wife, the simple Giulia. So even though the professor is the designated target for tonight, the pathetic and helpless Marcello cannot escape his thralldom to her. Soon -- yes! -- they're going on double dates!

The crosscurrents of longing, yearning, hating, loving, plotting and counterplotting get so dense you feel you've sunk into a maelstrom of conspiracy, and not just of political conspiracy. Poor Marcello is twisted this way and that by the conflicts of his desires until he's all but torn apart. It takes the secret policeman Manganiello to nudge him toward duty and the event itself, as coldblooded as can be imagined, finally takes place. The assassination is staged like the slaughter of Caesar with a crew of knifers closing in on the defenseless man. But the most savage moment comes when the woman he loves stumbles toward Marcello in search of mercy and he, of course, safe in his car, cut off from reality and humanity, coldly refuses.

"The Conformist" clearly retains its power to shock, to move and to make you weep. It no longer gives you much to think about.

The Conformist (115 minutes, at AFI's Silver Theatre) is rated R for violence and sexuality.