Passivity and violence – Film Review

Il Conformista (Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/France/Federal Republic of Germany, 1970)

Chameleon-like, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) bends, shifts, and changes to comply with the will of whoever he is with at the time: whether it be his fiancée, his mother, members of the Fascist movement, or even – through a flashback – the man who once tried to seduce him when he was a boy…

Unable to resolve the tensions created by his weakness, Clerici resorts to violence. Or rather, he relies on the violence of other people whom he passively watches as they act on his behalf. Thus he shoots the would-be pederast in his flashback, asks a fellow Fascist activist to deal with the problem of his mother’s lover, and watches as his old philosophy teacher Professor Quadri (the man whom Clerici himself had been sent to eliminate) is ambushed and shot, along with Anna Quadri, for whom Clerici had begun to develop feelings.

We find ourselves confronted with a passive hero, whose only solution is to his own problems is to call upon the violence of others. See Shakespeare’s Hamlet or the novel Endlich Stille for similarly violent passive heroes, and 1979 for one whose violence is turned inwards. on himself

Bertolucci’s screenplay is based on the 1951 novel The Conformist by Alberto Moravia. The film was shown at BFI Southbank on 13 February 2010.

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