The Conformist

The Conformist

Opening Shot

Stripes of light and shadow fall across Marcello Clerici's face as he rides in a car. Vittorio Storaro's camera watches him through venetian blinds, through bars, through architectural lines that cage him inside every frame. Georges Delerue's score hums with a melancholy that doesn't match the character's stated purpose (he's on his way to arrange a political assassination). Bertolucci tells you immediately: this man is a prisoner of his own need to belong.

What It Does

Storaro's cinematography in The Conformist is the most influential visual achievement of the 1970s after Gordon Willis's work on The Godfather. Every frame is composed around geometry: diagonals, symmetry, corridors of light that direct the eye the way fascist architecture directs the body. The Mussolini-era interiors are all marble, right angles, and monumental scale. Storaro lights them to look both beautiful and inhuman, which is the film's entire argument about fascism's aesthetic appeal. The ideology looks good. That's the point. That's the danger.

Delerue's score works against the visual grandeur with an intimacy that undercuts it. The main theme is a waltz, tender and slightly dated, the kind of music Clerici might have heard as a child. It plays over scenes of political violence and sexual manipulation with a gentleness that makes the content more disturbing, not less. Delerue scores the character's self-deception rather than his actions.

Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Clerici as a void. He joins the fascist party not out of conviction but out of a desperate need to be perceived as normal. His sexuality, his politics, his marriage are all performances designed to conceal an interior he can't face. Trintignant's genius is playing absence as a kind of presence: you watch him closely because there's nothing to see, and the nothing is the character.

Why It's on the List

The Conformist is the definitive film about how fascism recruits through aesthetics and belonging rather than argument. Bertolucci understood that Clerici doesn't join the party because he hates Jews or loves Mussolini. He joins because the party offers a structure that makes his internal chaos feel manageable. The film was a direct influence on Coppola (The Godfather), Scorsese (Taxi Driver), and the entire New Hollywood visual vocabulary. Storaro's images taught a generation of cinematographers that light could be an argument.

The Argument Against

The non-linear structure, which intercuts between Clerici's past and present, can feel unnecessarily fragmented. Some critics argue that Bertolucci's Freudian reading of fascism (Clerici's repressed homosexuality drives his political conformism) is reductive, reducing systemic political evil to individual pathology. The assassination sequence in the forest, while visually stunning, relies on a coincidence (Clerici's former professor is the target) that strains credibility in a film otherwise committed to psychological realism.

Closing Image

Mussolini has fallen. Clerici sits in the street as the regime collapses around him. He turns and sees a young man through a grate, lit in firelight. He stares. The camera holds on his face as the revolution passes by. The man who spent his life conforming has nothing left to conform to. Storaro frames him behind bars one final time. The cell is empty. The prisoner remains.