One rainy night in Paris in 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci was standing outside the Drugstore Saint Germain. It was a quarter to midnight. He was waiting for his mentor, the great New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, to arrive from the French premiere of the Italian's new film, The Conformist. "I haven't talked about this for dozens of years," says Bertolucci, "but Godard was my real guru, you understand? I used to think there was cinema before Godard and cinema after - like before and after Christ. So what he thought about the film meant a great deal to me."
The Conformist was an adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel, about a 30-year-old Italian Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), a repressed upper-class intellectual who, during Mussolini's rule, is hired by fascists to go to Paris and murder a dissident who was his former philosophy teacher. It's not just a politically engaged film, but also a stylish thriller complete with car chases, murders and sex that Bertolucci thought the Frenchman would like.
At midnight, Godard arrived for the rendezvous. Bertolucci, 37 years after the event, recalls exactly what happened next: "He doesn't say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao (毛澤東) portrait on it and with Jean-Luc's writing that we know from the handwriting on his films. The note says: 'You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.' That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet. I'm so sorry I did that because I would love to have it now, to keep it as a relic."
The Conformist, despite Godard's contempt, has proved to be one of the most influential postwar films. With it, Bertolucci looked back at Italy's fascist past, finding psychosexual dysfunction at its heart. It is a film made in the aftermath of 1968's failed utopian dreams, and yet one so visually daring and structurally sophisticated that without it, such masterpieces as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now would have been unimaginable.
Why do you think Godard didn't like The Conformist, I ask Bertolucci. It was, after all, partly a trenchant diagnosis of a fascistic mentality. "I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not."
But there might be another reason Godard didn't like the film. In it, Clerici asks for his doomed teacher's phone number and address. "The number was Jean-Luc's and the address was his on Rue Saint Jacques. So you can see that I was The Conformist wanting to kill the radical."
Indeed, Bertolucci takes delight in the fact that, for all Godard's Maoist contempt for The Conformist, a rising generation of filmmakers saw his picture as a revelation.
"What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride -is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence."
What did they find inspiring in the film? Its complex flashback structure, the symbolic color-coded photography of Bertolucci's director of photography Vittorio Storaro (whom Coppola would later use on Apocalypse Now) and several of its virtuosic showpiece scenes find echoes in many later films.
But The Conformist deserves to be appreciated not for prefiguring future cinematic masterpieces, but for itself. The chaotic handheld camera as fascist hitmen chase the central figure's lover through the woods. The chilly framing of iconic fascist buildings such as EUR in Rome and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The expressionist angles when The Conformist visits his dotty mother. And, perhaps best of all, the ingenious sequence in a Parisian cafe in which Clerici's reluctance to participate in a farandole dance leads him to being surrounded by an ever-tightening spiral of dancers, the whole thing shot ingeniously from above. Rarely has cinema been so poetic, so daring or freighted. This film will be a revelation for cinemagoers who only know Bertolucci for his later, relatively stodgy films such as The Last Emperor, Stealing Beauty or The Sheltering Sky.
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