Bertolucci, who postponed the editing of The Spider's Stratagem to begin preparations for The Conformist, tells us with this one once again of a vocation to lose oneself or, better, to annihilate oneself. Marcello Clerici - afflicted by a drug-addicted mother and deprived of his father, a former thug who now resides permanently in a mental institution - goes to Paris with his new wife Giulia to eliminate an overly active anti-fascist, who was his philosophy teacher, and falls in love with his wife Anna, leading both to death. In this elegant transposition of Moravia's novel, the director summarizes his most important codes. 1) Mimicry: everyone would like to appear different from everyone else and instead Marcello wants to resemble everyone. 2) The official story, trivialized and at the same time made monstrous by everyday life. 3) The reduction of reality to a scene, sensual and sumptuous, imposing-oppressive, "Mesopotamian", triumphant. 4) The search for psychological and spiritual roots, Proustism. 5) The spider strategy, which is that of the director, committed to enveloping the spectator in a thin network of quotations and figures. 6) Melodrama, evoked by the numerous references to his literary, operatic, cinematographic tradition, and by the classic scheme of the triangle. 7) The flashback, a technical-stylistic expedient that allows the recovery of memory and the inversion of time. 8) The Oedipal rebellion of the sons against the fathers, of the disciple against the master. 9) The formal and thematic doubling. 10) Quotation of every type and in every way: reticular, parallel or indirect. To these ten strong points or signs must be added a vague Hadrianic twilight (Marcello recites: «Animula vagula, blandula,/ Hospes comesque corporis...») that alludes to the crumbling of an entire civilization, to the failure of any utopian communion of wise men or iron dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus reality is transformed into an ambiguous theatrical scenario, with explicit references to Magritte, or into a real projection on the bottom of Plato’s cave. Because at the root of Marcello’s pathological conformism there is a mystery made of irresolution and suffering, in addition to a disturbing youthful episode that the protagonist hides from others and even from himself.
