When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.

If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.

Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice.  It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.

-Brandon Ledet