Style and Narrative in (Bernardo) Bertolucci's the Conformist (1996)

part, this essay is a continuation of my article `Melodramatic Narrative' in CineAction 31 (Spring/Summer 1993). Using Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1922) and Ford's The Searchers (1956) as my main examples, I argued there that a past `traumatic event' in a film -- usually but not always in someone's childhood -- tends to generate a certain sort of narrative, in which the event is echoed, in different ways, within the text of the film, until the trauma which initiated the action could be `healed' by a changed set of circumstances. I am going to argue that The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) has a similar structure but, in order to do this, I will need to refer much more than in my earlier examples to the film's visual style (mise-en-scene and editing) as well as its narrative. As has been frequently noted, The Conformist is a very stylish film indeed, and this style fuses with the film's similarly richly-textured narrative to provide an unusually powerful and complex whole. At the time of the film's release in the UK, Bertolucci himself referred to its style in terms of influence: One could say the point of departure (of the film) was the cinema, and the cinema I like is Sternberg, Ophuls and Welles (1). summary, this refers to a highly elaborate and sensuous visual style: Sternbergian lighting, Opulsian camera movements, Wellesian cranes. Nevertheless, whereas certain elements of the film's style -- e.g. the different visual allusions to the metaphor of Plato's cave -- are features of a conscious aesthetic discourse, there are other elements which seem unconscious. As T. Jefferson Kline among others has noted (2), the film is peculiarly oneiric in feel, providing material for psychoanalytical readings which explore beyond Bertolucci's conscious design. The Conformist is based, in terms of plot quite closely, on Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel of the same name. But the narrative of the two works is radically different. Most of the film has a complex flashback structure, with past events recalled by Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) during a long car journey from Paris to the South of France. Moravia's novel, by contrast, has a linear narrative, beginning with Marcello as a boy and ending at the time of Mussolini's downfall in 1943. Most of the film's key events are nevertheless from the novel: the incident in which the 13 year-old Marcello thinks he's killed the chauffeur, Lino, who tried to seduce him; his becoming a Fascist; his marriage to the petite bourgeois Giulia; his plan to use his honeymoon to visit his old professor, Luca Quadri, now an anti-fascist exile in Paris, to spy on him; the change of orders, with Marcello now being told that Quadri is to be murdered; Marcello's attraction to Quadri's young wife (here called -- rather pointedly -- Lina); her unexpected departure with her husband which results in her being assassinated as well. The major plot difference is in the ending. Although the miraculous reappearance of a live Lino is introduced at the same point in the story (the day of Mussolini's downfall), Marcello in the novel is then killed, along with his wife and child, in a plane attack on his car as he flees Rome. As Bertolucci has pointed out, this ending continues Moravia's preoccupation with `the forces of destiny', whereas he himself sought to substitute a more psychoanalytical pattern on the events in Marcello's life (3). Kline's article includes a detailed discussion of the process of adaptation from novel to film. On The Conformist, Bertolucci used Franco Arcalli as his editor for the first time. He has spoken enthusiastically of Arcalli's contribution: In a matter of days he assembled the first few sequences of The Conformist and I immediately fell in love with it. Kim (Arcalli) is the person who is responsible for having made me discover what editing can really be. He led me by the hand into a world I had always perceived as a necessary evil. …