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The Conformist: 1970
Director B. Bertolucci
Paramount Home Video (1986)
555 Melrose Ave.
Hollywood, CA 90038
Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film, The Conformist, is based on Alberto Moravia's novel about a young man, Marcello, in pre-war Italy, who volunteers his services to the Fascists, not out of ideology, but to blend in, disguising his perverse sado-masochistic tendencies by expressing them through a perverse cultural norm. Bertolucci has changed the focus of Moravia's plot by presenting most of the story through Marcello's reminiscences as he is driven towards the film's central scene, a particularly violent assassination. Marcello has helped set up the assassination of his former teacher, Luco Quadri, but now he is chasing after Quadri's car with the vague hope of saving Quadri's wife, Anna, who has unexpectedly joined him on the fatal trip. The car and Marcello's memories converge on the assassination, making it the intense focal point of the film.
Marcello's reminiscences are presented with the subtle distortions of subjective memory. Through them we share some of Marcello's own confusion about his motives. We see that he harbours anger towards his psychotic father and drug-addicted mother. We also learn that as a child he was the victim of an attempted seduction at the hands of a young man, Lino, and ended up shooting his seducer, leaving him for dead. He marries a woman he does not love and falls in love with a woman he hardly knows. In its subjectivity and uncertainty the film is similar to an analytic hour. If we approach it that way, we can see that hidden in this tale of an abused and tortured man is another, shorter tale of a child and a primal scene fantasy. It is as if we could reconstruct an early screen memory that adds meaning to the current surface.
One clue to the unconscious in an analytic hour is the presence of repetitions. The Conformist can easily be seen to have continual repetitions of primal scene imagery, imagery relating to a child witnessing p