What if the most dangerous thing a person can want is to be normal?
Not powerful. Not famous. Not loved in the way that songs describe. Just normal. Just the same as everyone else. Just invisible in the way that people who belong are invisible, the way a brick in a wall is invisible, the way a suit in a crowd of suits is invisible. What if a man wanted that so badly he would kill for it?
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist is built on this premise, and the premise is so quiet, so mundane, so lacking in the grandeur we expect from stories about fascism, that it takes the entire film to understand how lethal it is. Marcello Clerici does not join the Italian Fascist Party because he believes in Mussolini’s ideology. He does not believe in anything. That is the problem. That is the engine. Marcello joins because the party is the largest room available, and in a large enough room, a man who feels fundamentally wrong can disappear into the crowd and feel, for a moment, like everyone else.
The film tells you why in the first act, though it tells you slant.
Marcello, as a boy, was molested by a chauffeur named Lino. The scene is handled with a restraint that borders on withholding. You see the car. You see the room. You see the gun. You see the boy fire the gun and believe he has killed the man. And then the film moves forward, and Marcello grows up, and the molestation is never discussed again in the terms a modern audience would expect. There is no therapy. There is no confrontation. There is no language for what happened, because the film is set in a time and a place and a masculinity where such language does not exist.
What exists instead is architecture. Marcello builds a life the way you build a wall: brick by brick, with mortar made of normalcy. He marries a woman he does not love. He takes a government job. He attends church. He wears the right suit. He says the right things. He is, by every external measure, unremarkable. And the unremarkability is the project. Every choice Marcello makes is a choice designed to produce the appearance of a man who has no interior life worth examining. The interior life is there. It is enormous. It is the thing the entire structure is built to conceal.
Bertolucci and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, shoot this concealment as light and shadow.
The film is among the most beautiful ever made, and the beauty is not decorative. It is diagnostic. Every frame is composed with a precision that mirrors Marcello’s own project of self-construction. The lines are clean. The symmetry is oppressive. The light falls in shafts that divide rooms into zones of visibility and darkness, and Marcello moves between them, stepping into the light when he must perform and retreating into shadow when the performance is not required.
Storaro uses colour the way Resnais used language in Hiroshima Mon Amour: not to describe a feeling but to enact one. The amber of the Fascist offices. The cold blue of the Paris streets. The white of the dance hall where Marcello watches his wife and Anna dance together, and the white is not innocence, it is exposure, it is the colour of a man who has been caught looking at something he cannot name.
Because Marcello looks. That is the other secret the film keeps in plain sight. He looks at men. He looks at Lino. He looks at Manganiello, his Fascist handler, with a gaze the film never labels but never conceals. And he looks at Anna Quadri, his former professor’s wife, with a desire that is real but also a performance of desire, a desire designed to prove to himself that he desires the right thing, the normal thing, the thing a man in a suit in a crowd of suits is supposed to desire.
The assignment is simple. Marcello is sent to Paris to locate his former professor, Quadri, an anti-Fascist intellectual living in exile. He is to help arrange Quadri’s assassination. The mission is political. Marcello accepts it for reasons that are not.
He accepts because the party asked him to. Because saying yes is what normal men do when the institution that guarantees their normalcy makes a request. Because refusal would be a form of distinction, and distinction is what Marcello cannot afford. To refuse would be to have a position. To have a position would be to have an interior. To have an interior would be to confront what is inside it.
So he goes to Paris. He meets Quadri. He meets Anna. And the film opens up, briefly, like a fist unclenching.
Anna is everything Marcello has built his life to avoid. She is free. She is sexual in a way that is not performative. She is attracted to Marcello’s wife, Giulia, openly, playfully, without apology. She moves through rooms as though the rooms belong to her. And Marcello watches her with a hunger that the film allows to be two things at once: he wants Anna, and he wants to be Anna. He wants the freedom she has. The freedom to be visible, to take up space, to desire without checking first whether the desire is acceptable.
He cannot have it. The structure will not permit it. And so the structure does what structures do when they are threatened. It reasserts itself.
The assassination scene in the woods is one of the most devastating sequences in cinema, and its devastation comes not from violence but from stillness.
Marcello sits in a car. Through the windshield, he watches Quadri being stabbed. Anna runs. She runs toward the car. She runs toward Marcello. She puts her hands on the glass. She looks at him. She asks him to help.
He does not move.
The glass between them is the film’s central image. Not the Fascist offices, not the dance hall, not the symmetrical corridors. The glass. The transparent barrier that lets you see everything and touch nothing. Marcello watches Anna die the way the doctor in Sátántangó watches the village collapse: from behind a window, with complete visibility and zero intervention. But the doctor was a passive man in a passive world. Marcello is an active participant who has chosen passivity as his method. He arranged this. He delivered Quadri to the killers. And now he sits in the car and watches the consequence of his arrangement, and he does not move, because moving would require becoming a person, and becoming a person is the one thing he has spent his entire life refusing to do.
Anna dies against the glass. Her breath fogs it. Her hands leave prints. And Marcello sits, and the engine idles, and the conformist conforms to the last requirement of his conformity: he lets the institution do what it does, and he watches, and he does nothing, because doing nothing is the price of belonging.
There is a moment after the war when the regime falls. Mussolini is deposed. The streets fill with people celebrating. And Marcello, walking through Rome at night, encounters Lino. The chauffeur. The man he thought he killed as a boy. Alive. On a bridge. With a young man.
Marcello’s reaction is instant and ugly. He points at Lino and denounces him. He shouts. He calls him a Fascist. He calls him a murderer. He pins every crime of the regime on this man, this specific man, as though Lino were the source of everything that went wrong, as though the molestation and the party and the assassination and the glass and the blood on the snow were all one man’s fault, and if that man could be identified and blamed, Marcello could finally be clean.
It is the most pathetic scene in the film. Not the most violent. Not the most tragic. The most pathetic. Because you see, in Marcello’s desperation, the entire architecture collapse. The normalcy was never real. The conformity was never stable. It was held together by the regime, and when the regime fell, the structure fell with it, and what remains is a man on a bridge screaming at the past, trying to make the past carry the weight that belongs to him.
The final shot finds Marcello sitting on a step, his face half in shadow, half in firelight. He turns. He looks at something the camera does not show you. And in that look is the thing the film has been withholding for two hours: the interior. The real one. The one beneath the suit and the marriage and the party membership and the murder. It is not remorse. It is not self-knowledge. It is hunger. The same hunger that was there at the beginning, before the structure was built, before the bricks were laid. The hunger to be touched, to be seen, to be known. The hunger that the conformity was built to starve.
This is what The Conformist can do to you. It can make you feel the weight of a life spent refusing to live. Not a life of evil, though evil is committed. Not a life of cowardice, though cowardice is demonstrated. A life of absence. A life in which every action is designed to produce the appearance of a person where no person is permitted to exist.
You watch Marcello and you think: I know this. Not the Fascism. Not the murder. The other thing. The smaller thing. The daily calibration of the self to match the room. The measurement of your own desires against what the room will tolerate. The slow, patient work of making yourself invisible so that no one will look closely enough to see what you are hiding.
Bertolucci is not saying that conformity leads to Fascism, though it does. He is saying something more intimate and more disturbing. He is saying that conformity is itself a kind of violence. A violence directed inward, at the self that wants and hungers and desires in ways the structure will not permit. And when that violence has nowhere left to go, it goes outward. It finds a professor in the woods. It finds a woman against the glass.
The most dangerous thing a person can want is to be normal.
The film proves it. And you sit with the proof, and you feel it in the part of you that has ever adjusted your voice, your posture, your desire, your truth, to fit the shape of the room you were in.
That part.
The film finds it.