Blending In

"The Conformist" was a chillingly quietly designed film, everything undemonstrative curves and unfussy opulence. Marcello’s trajectory through the murder of a family employee when he was a child, a blank-eyed marriage and robotic, opiated pursuit of social and political success is hard to look away from; its exhausted, uncomprehending finale is thrown into sharp relief by the huge events taking place away from the screen. In the film, the characters are barely human, driven by self-serving, servile, pinched ideology that embeds them. There’s an unbearable relentlessness to the progress of the plot that’s entirely right.