The Conformist

See also The Conformist (moth) for the insect.

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Italian book cover.

The Conformist (Il conformista) is a novel by Alberto Moravia published in 1951, which details the life and desire for normality of a government official during Italy's fascist period. It is also known for the 1970 film adaptation by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Plot summary

Prologue

In the prologue, the reader witnesses numerous formative events from a short period in Marcello’s childhood. In the first event, Marcello coldly kills several lizards in the yard between his home and the home of his neighbor and friend, Roberto. He tries to coax Roberto into offering some sort of approval of this behavior, and when Roberto doesn’t comply, they fight and Roberto leaves. Marcello later obtains a slingshot and fires a few stones through the ivy that covers the fence around Roberto’s family’s house, only to find that he has killed their family cat instead of Roberto. Marcello is mortified not so much by his actions but by what he perceives as the abnormality of his sentiments.

Marcello also witnesses a fight between his parents that is later revealed to mark the beginning of his father’s decline into mental illness. Marcello’s mother and housemaid discover that his father has vandalized a photograph of Marcello and his mother by poking holes through their eyes and drawing streaks of blood on their faces. His father ultimately chases his mother around the house and attacks her in the bedroom, leaving Marcello torn between whether to rescue his mother or aid his father. In this passage, it is revealed that Marcello’s father often physically abuses the boy.

The final section of the prologue covers Marcello’s torment at the hands of his classmates, who use his somewhat effeminate appearance to question his gender. One day, five classmates follow Marcello home from school and try to force him to wear a dress, but their attack is interrupted by a chauffeur who happens on the scene and offers to drive Marcello home. En route, the chauffeur appears to proposition Marcello, offering him a pistol in exchange for unspecified actions. The chauffeur – who reveals himself to be a former priest, de-frocked for indecent behavior – ultimately stops himself before initiating any actions with Marcello and begs the boy to ignore him if he tries to speak to him again. Marcello doesn’t fully understand what is happening, and his desire for the pistol leads him to go with the chauffeur again a few days later. This time, the chauffer, named Lino, locks himself in the room with Marcello and tells the boy that he won’t be able to escape the (still unspoken) abuse to come. During the struggle, Lino’s gun comes loose and Marcello grabs it. When Lino tells Marcello to shoot him, he complies and flees out the window.

Part I

Part I opens with Marcello, now a state employee, looking though old newspaper clippings for information on the incident with Lino. He ultimately finds an obituary that blames the death on an accident during the cleaning of the gun. While Marcello does not feel true remorse, he does seek some absolution for this incident throughout the novel.

A colleague of Marcello’s named Orlando asks Marcello to participate in a mission to Paris. A former professor of Marcello’s, named Quadri, is now an anti-fascist agitator, and the Italian government would like to infiltrate his organization. Marcello is also due to be married shortly to a woman named Giulia, and offers to take his honeymoon in Paris so that his presence there would not be suspicious to Quadri.

Marcello also takes confession, despite his apparent atheism, as a prelude to the Catholic wedding his wife expects. He confesses to murdering Lino, and the priest indicates that he can seek absolution if he feels true remorse for his actions – an emotion that Marcello does not appear capable of feeling.

The section closes in the days leading up to Marcello’s wedding, and we see his mother-in-law lavishing praise upon him, in stark contrast to his mother, who now lives alone in squalor. His father has been in an asylum for six years and suffers from the delusion that he is one of Mussolini’s top aides. Marcello and his mother make their monthly visit to his father, who neither recognizes them nor even acknowledges their presence. On the return trip, Marcello’s mother gives him a wedding present but indicates that she won’t be attending the ceremony.

Part II

Part II covers the honeymoon and the odd interpersonal relationships that unfold between Marcello, Giulia, Quadri, and Quadri’s voluptuous young wife, Lina. En route to Paris, Marcello makes a scheduled stop at a brothel in a small, unnamed town in France, where he is to meet Agent Orlando for further instructions. At the brothel, Marcello is mistaken for a client, causing him some embarrassment before Orlando arrives to tell him that the new plan is to kill Quadri. Marcello needs simply to confirm Quadri’s identity to Orlando to fulfill his duties. As he is leaving, Marcello realizes he has forgotten his hat, but when he goes to retrieve it, he finds Orlando with his arm around a prostitute to whom Marcello feels a strange attraction.

Marcello experiences the same feeling when he and Giulia head to Quadri’s apartment, as Lina reminds him in some ways of that prostitute, and Marcello tells himself that he is in love with Lina despite her apparent dislike for him. Lina allows Marcello to begin to seduce her, but always keeps him at arm’s length, even telling him that she and Quadri are aware that he is a spy there in service of the Italian government.

While Lina and Giulia head out shopping, Marcello is accosted by an old man who first mistakes him for a beggar, and then mistakes him for a homosexual or perhaps a prostitute, revisiting the humiliation of the incident with Lino on Marcello. When the old man refuses to take Marcello back to his hotel, Marcello pulls his gun and demands to be let out of the vehicle.

Marcello’s feelings for Lina intensify alongside a growing contempt for her when he sees her attempting to seduce Giulia and realizes that her interest in him is merely for show. Lina’s pursuit of Giulia leads to an argument in a nightclub where Giulia tells Lina that she is not a lesbian and has no interest in an affair.

At a dinner, Quadri asks Marcello to post a letter for him on his way back to Italy, as Quadri’s activities are monitored and the letter might be intercepted otherwise. Marcello refuses, and Quadri takes this as a sign of solidarity, as Marcello could have taken the letter and turned it over to the authorities instead. However, Marcello does confirm Quadri’s identity to Orlando, and on a trip to Savoy, Quadri – as well as Lina, who left with him in response to Giulia’s rejection – is killed by Orlando and his men.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly explores Marcello’s conflicted responses to his role in the murders of Quadri and Lina, including his attempts to rationalize away his culpability. The epilogue takes place years later, on the night that Mussolini falls from power. Giulia reveals that she has long suspected that Marcello was involved in the murders, but her sorrow is more for their own safety than for Marcello’s victims or his duplicity.

The two go out for a drive and walk that evening, and while Giulia tries to convince Marcello to make love to her in a wooded area, a stranger arrives and calls to Marcello by name. Marcello is floored to see that it is Lino, reports of whose death were greatly exaggerated. Marcello shows real emotion for the first time in the book when he screams at Lino and blames him for ruining his life by taking his innocence. Lino defends himself by arguing that the loss of innocence is inevitable and is merely a part of the human experience. This speech leads Marcello to the beginning of acceptance of his own non-conformity.

The novel’s closing passage has Marcello, Giulia, and their daughter driving to the mountains to evade possible reprisals for Marcello’s role with the government. En route, they drive into an air raid, and their car is strafed with bullets. Giulia and the daughter are killed in the first wave, and Marcello falls out of the car, wounded. Realizing his wife and daughter are dead, he waits for the second wave to return. The novel ends with Marcello hearing the plane’s approach.

Major themes

Marcello spends the entire novel in a search for what he perceives to be a normal life - normal activities, a normal appearance, normal emotions, and so on. However, he confuses normality with conformity, and in his quest to conform, subjugates his already-repressed emotions. When the natural course of his life presents him with ethical dilemmas - the assignment to betray Professor Quadri, his attraction to women other than his wife - he is ill-prepared to deal with them. Moravia also intimates a connection between sexual repression and fascism.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The Conformist
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Directed by	Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by	Bernardo Bertolucci Alberto Moravia novel
Produced by	Giovanni Bertolucci Maurizio Lodi-Fe
Starring	Jean-Louis Trintignant Stefania Sandrelli Dominique Sanda Pierre Clémenti Gastone Moschin
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	22 October, 1970 (USA, Italy)
Running time	115 Minutes 120 Minutes
Language	Italian

The 1970 film version by Bernardo Bertolucci starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda.

The movie opens with the protagonist in Paris finalizing preparations to assassinate his former college professor, Luca Quadri. Through a series of flashbacks we see him discussing his plans to marry with a blind friend, his somewhat awkward attempts to join the secret police, his visit to his morphine-addicted mother at the family's decaying villa and to his unhinged father at an insane asylum.

In one of these flashbacks we see him as a boy at the time of World War I, who finds himself isolated from society by his family's wealth. He has it better than other children too because he is regularly chauffered to school. Even still, he is mistreated by his schoolmates and suffered a seduction attempt by the chauffer Lino that he apparently kills in self-defence.

Another features a heated discussion over whether it is necessary to go to Confession just to get married. He reluctantly agrees, and it is there that he admits to having committed sins, including the single homosexual experience with Lino, killing him, premarital sex and not having confessed for 15 years or so. The priest is shocked but warns him how important it is to confess.

As a man in Fascist Italy, he finds himself a cog in the great machine that keeps Italy going. Although he has gotten married, and gets to go to Paris for his honeymoon, he is also ordered to secure the assassination of his old friend and teacher, now an exile living in France. The duty to follow orders becomes more urgent now that his teacher is a famed opponent to the fascist movement in 1930s Italy. When his superior officer Manganiello hands him a gun to make sure the job gets done, the hero replies that he does not want to carry a gun but does not explain why. The conflict between marital love and political duty is made more pronounced here because it is a conflict between his duty to the woman he has married, a woman of high social standing, culture, and party loyalty, which is responsible for his salary, his sabbaticals, and his paychecks.

Since he was having a hard time pulling off the assassination at a big party that was thrown, more operatives are brought in from Italy to get the job done. This leads to a meandering drive through some snowy mountain peaks, the protagonist in a car closely trailing the professor's. As he looks on, the operatives lure the professor from his stopped car and gang-stab him to death in a scene alluding to the murder of Julius Caesar. In an even more traumatic scene, the professor's wife Anna - whom the protagonist has developed feelings for - is chased through the woods and finally shot.

If there are any deep-seated feelings of guilt or remorse for killing the man who tried to rape him when he was a teenager, a surprise ending turns everything around, and gives the viewer reason to reflect; Marcello recognizes a person that he encounters in 1943 during the fall of fascist dictatorship as Lino and loudly accuses him of the assassination of Quadri.

Often widely praised as a visual masterpiece, the film was photographed by Vittorio Storaro, with rich colours, authentic wardrobe of the 1930s, and series of unusual camera angles and fluid camera movement. The image of blowing leaves in The Conformist influenced a very similar scene in The Godfather, Part II by Francis Ford Coppola (1974).

The first American release of the film was trimmed compared to the Italian one.

Bertolucci was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The film was released in US on DVD by Paramount Home Entertainment on December 5, 2006.

See also

• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - another Italian novel and film about life during Mussolini's regime.

External links

• The Conformist at IMDb