Defining Favourites: The Conformist (1970)

Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece remains one of the most politically radical films ever made.

image via Raro Video

• Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

• Screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia

• Produced by Maurizio Lodi-Fe

• Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, Fosco Giachetti, José Quaglio, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clémenti

• Premiere Date: July 1, 1970

• Running Time: 108 minutes

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist remains one of the most politically charged films ever made: by nature of its premise, its setting, and also the overt willingness to trust in a government to a point of suppressing themselves as human beings. There are a lot of words to cover how the political content of The Conformist indeed only feels as if it were increasing in relevance today, but perhaps the fact that it’s so dazzling and hypnotic only sells you in on a movie that heightens up such anxieties about the dangers of blind normalization and acceptance of everything that a party you support stands for, even if it conflicts with your own interests.

That’s also what makes Marcello Clerici such a fascinating protagonist by nature. Marcello is not a man who sees himself as having any real agency, beyond wanting to be seen as “normal” as he thinks that it will fulfill him any further, to be ignorant of the world around him, so that he would be deemed socially acceptable. For it’s also what makes Marcello’s story very deeply tragic in turn too, because so much of his own story is stuck in the shadows at that – perhaps emphasized even further by the shadowy cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, but also in the fact that The Conformist is a film all about a closeted gay man being made to suppress his own humanity for the sake of being presentable in a “decent society.”