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Local Politics and "The Conformist"
Nov. 4th, 2015 10:17 amWent to the Dem post-election party, which was bor-r-ring. It’s a dilemma: The only politics that matter are local politics, but the people who get involved with local politics are almost invariably quite dull. Almost invariably.
The City of Poughkeepsie managed to elect another white Republican – this one a retired police detective – which fuckin’ disgusts me. Out of a population of 33,000, fewer than 4,500 bothered to vote.
“Well, black people don’t vote,” Aurora told me when I was giving her the whirlwind tour of Poughkeepsie.
Hey! She’s black so she’s allowed to make those kinds of sweeping generalizations.
Came home and watched Bernardo Bertolucchi’s The Conformist. For like the 20th time.
When I first saw The Conformist in 1970, its political subtext was entirely lost on me. I was only interested in ogling Dominique Sanda, dead ringer for Diana Ruston, professional whimsy princess, the first woman I ever fell seriously in love with. Naturally, all I focused on was the incipient Lesbian relationship between Sanda and Stefania Sandrinelli as Clerici’s vacuous, petit bourgeois, but appealing wife, the incredible tango scene between the two women, their amazing clothes.
The movie seemed utterly without plot to me. A series of astounding composition shots – vast bureaucratic buildings that dwarfed human occupants, strange people doing strange things – the snippet of Sanda as a prostitute early in the film, gurgling, Sonno pazzo, sonno pazzo!; a man in an insane asylum who wraps his straight jacket around himself, its straps trailing like the wings of a broken bird; those last strange scenes in the candle-lit tunnels of Rome’s Coliseum. Above all else, that one dreamy shot at ground level of Clerici and his mother in an ancient limousine while the wind blows dead leaves their way – a shot, I believe, that Francis Ford Coppola later appropriated for Frido’s death sentence in The Godfather II.
So, I was surprised to discover last night that The Conformist has, in fact, a very cogent storyline. It’s a story about a man who’s so desperate to be normal that he’ll do anything to achieve normalacy. Even murdering what he loves the most. Normalacy, he discovers, is the path of least resistance.
In Italy, during the 1930s, normalacy was fascism.
The movie’s juxtaposition of sexual deviance and political repression is a Freudian assumption that seems completely out of whack these days. (Although every other day, it seems, The Daily Mail feels the urge to run yet another piece on twisted Nazi sex lives.) But possibly it will be back in style in another 20 years or so. There are no such things as moral absolutes.
Still. The Conformist is amazingly strong in its visuals, the fluidity of its camera angles, the lush, decadent romanticism of the world it creates. A series of visuals that can’t be rendered in words. Film is essentially a visual medium, and yet there are so few films that can’t be summed up with an elevator pitch that's actually better than suffering through the movie. The Conformist is one of those few, and that makes it brilliant.
Here’s what Dominque Sanda looks like today, by the way:
She's my age.
The City of Poughkeepsie managed to elect another white Republican – this one a retired police detective – which fuckin’ disgusts me. Out of a population of 33,000, fewer than 4,500 bothered to vote.
“Well, black people don’t vote,” Aurora told me when I was giving her the whirlwind tour of Poughkeepsie.
Hey! She’s black so she’s allowed to make those kinds of sweeping generalizations.
Came home and watched Bernardo Bertolucchi’s The Conformist. For like the 20th time.
When I first saw The Conformist in 1970, its political subtext was entirely lost on me. I was only interested in ogling Dominique Sanda, dead ringer for Diana Ruston, professional whimsy princess, the first woman I ever fell seriously in love with. Naturally, all I focused on was the incipient Lesbian relationship between Sanda and Stefania Sandrinelli as Clerici’s vacuous, petit bourgeois, but appealing wife, the incredible tango scene between the two women, their amazing clothes.
The movie seemed utterly without plot to me. A series of astounding composition shots – vast bureaucratic buildings that dwarfed human occupants, strange people doing strange things – the snippet of Sanda as a prostitute early in the film, gurgling, Sonno pazzo, sonno pazzo!; a man in an insane asylum who wraps his straight jacket around himself, its straps trailing like the wings of a broken bird; those last strange scenes in the candle-lit tunnels of Rome’s Coliseum. Above all else, that one dreamy shot at ground level of Clerici and his mother in an ancient limousine while the wind blows dead leaves their way – a shot, I believe, that Francis Ford Coppola later appropriated for Frido’s death sentence in The Godfather II.
So, I was surprised to discover last night that The Conformist has, in fact, a very cogent storyline. It’s a story about a man who’s so desperate to be normal that he’ll do anything to achieve normalacy. Even murdering what he loves the most. Normalacy, he discovers, is the path of least resistance.
In Italy, during the 1930s, normalacy was fascism.
The movie’s juxtaposition of sexual deviance and political repression is a Freudian assumption that seems completely out of whack these days. (Although every other day, it seems, The Daily Mail feels the urge to run yet another piece on twisted Nazi sex lives.) But possibly it will be back in style in another 20 years or so. There are no such things as moral absolutes.
Still. The Conformist is amazingly strong in its visuals, the fluidity of its camera angles, the lush, decadent romanticism of the world it creates. A series of visuals that can’t be rendered in words. Film is essentially a visual medium, and yet there are so few films that can’t be summed up with an elevator pitch that's actually better than suffering through the movie. The Conformist is one of those few, and that makes it brilliant.
Here’s what Dominque Sanda looks like today, by the way:
She's my age.
