Review of The Conformist (1971) by Kajori A — 15 Jun 2008

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a young upper class man who works for the Fascists as a spy and a killer. Boyishly handsome in his beautifully tailored suits, Clerici, a young philosophy professor from Rome, is hardly likeable.

Solitary, superior and mocking, with an almost pathological love of order and tidiness, he rarely acknowledges his own pain or that of others, preferring to laugh it away. He's also a consummate actor, his greatest role being that of a "normal" man.

This is why he marries the "petit bourgeois" Guilia, "all bedroom and kitchen", and this is why he becomes a volunteer for the Fascist party. Clerici chooses to be a conformist (there is great safety in numbers), but he is a conformist whose chief enemy is himself.

He is too intelligent, too filled with self-loathing (he is a killer and a homosexual), and too aware of his own duplicity to be convinced by all the play-acting. What I found particularly fascinating is that the film gives us a central character who, despite being both protagonist and victim, is deeply repelling, and yet we stick with him to the bitter end, not because we like him, but because we know what it is like to be him.

As David Thomson has pointed out, "this is cinema that refuses to please" - there is no easy way out!