A film can be an essay, a poem, a theorem. Rarely can it be all three at once. In 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci did not simply direct an adaptation of Moravia's novel; he forged a treatise on the aesthetics of moral decay, a visual autopsy of one man's soul and, by synecdoche, of an entire nation choosing the shadows for fear of the light. "The Conformist" is not a film about fascism. It is a film about how fascism looks, how it seduces through order, symmetry, and the promise of an anaesthetizing normality. It is a work that, more than fifty years after its release, continues to cast its long, sharp shadows over our understanding of cinema as a language.

The protagonist, Marcello Clerici, played by a Jean-Louis Trintignant who moves with the rigidity of an automaton and the gaze of a trapped animal, is the pneumatic void at the center of a geometric universe. He is no ideologue, no fanatic; he is something infinitely more terrifying: a man who desperately desires to be normal. His allegiance to the regime is not a political choice, but a form of therapy. It is an attempt to bury a childhood trauma, an ambiguous and violent sexual encounter that has branded him with the seal of otherness. For Clerici, the black shirt is a uniform less of power than of invisibility. It is his moral algorithm: if everyone does the same thing, if everyone obeys the same orders, then individual anomaly vanishes into the collective equation. In this, Clerici is a Dostoevskian cousin to the characters of Kafka, a man who seeks salvation not in God or revolution, but in bureaucracy, in the act of filling out a form that certifies him as "normal."

It is here that Bertolucci's work transcends Moravia's page and becomes pure cinema, an architecture of the psyche. Alongside his magician of light, Vittorio Storaro, the director constructs a world that is the physical projection of Clerici's mental state. The immense, empty halls of the Fascist era, with their exaggerated perspectives and totalitarian geometries, are not mere set dressing; they are cathedrals of angst, mental spaces where the individual is crushed by the grandiloquence of the collective. Storaro's cinematography is a masterclass that dialogues directly with painting, from Caravaggio in its dramatic chiaroscuro to de Chirico in its metaphysical, silent piazzas. Light does not illuminate; it defines, sculpts, imprisons. The omnipresent Venetian blinds cast bars of light and shadow on the characters, transforming every interior into a psychological prison. We are closer to the German Expressionism of Murnau and Lang than to Italian Neorealism; the external reality is distorted to reflect the internal pathology.

The film's narrative structure, a labyrinth of flashbacks nested within Clerici’s car journey toward his appointment with murder, is itself a statement of intent. It is not a linear tale, but a fractured stream of consciousness, a memory that resurfaces in fits and starts, as disordered and obsessive as its protagonist's mind. It is an editing style reminiscent of the modernist fragmentation of a T.S. Eliot, with his Marcello who could very well be one of the "Hollow Men," stuffed with straw, who whisper together "not with a bang but a whimper." His journey toward the assassination of his former professor, Quadri, is not the progression of a thriller, but a descent into a personal inferno where every station is a memory, and every memory a crack in the facade of his constructed normality.

The female figures are the gravitational forces that disturb his calculated orbit. His wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), is the portrait of petit-bourgeois mediocrity, a "normality" so perfect it borders on parody. She is childish, frivolous, a concentrate of all the clichés Clerici believes he desires, yet their intimacy is clumsy, a performance devoid of warmth. And then there is Anna Quadri (Dominique Sanda), the professor's wife, Giulia's antithesis. Free, cultured, bisexual, politically engaged. Anna is everything Marcello has repressed, everything he is fleeing from. The celebrated tango scene between Giulia and Anna is a moment of pure cinematic epiphany: an instant of grace, of authentic and dangerous attraction that excludes Marcello completely. He watches them, separate, unable to participate in that dance of freedom. His mission, then, is not merely to eliminate a political enemy, but to extinguish the possibility of a different life, to shatter the mirror showing him his own vacuity.

The production of the film is itself an anecdote that illuminates its genius. Storaro, obsessed with the idea of representing a past that looms over the present, used lighting techniques and filters to create a visual patina, giving the viewer the feeling of watching a memory, not an event in real time. The dominant blue of the Parisian exteriors, cold and spectral, contrasts with the warm, ochre tones of the Roman interiors, creating a chromatic dialectic between the reality of the present (the murderous mission) and the fictitious warmth of the conformist's nest Marcello is trying to build. This is not decoration; it is exegesis.

The film belongs to a cultural context, that of 1970s Italy, in which the analysis of fascism was no longer a simple act of historical condemnation but a psychoanalytic inquiry into its roots. Bertolucci, a Marxist intellectual, is not interested in creating an anti-fascist pamphlet. He is interested in dismantling the psychological mechanism that leads an individual to trade one's freedom for the security of the herd. It is an operation that aligns him with Fassbinder in Germany, who, with The Marriage of Maria Braun, would similarly explore a nation's postwar neuroses. But where Fassbinder uses the melodrama, Bertolucci uses grand opera, a grand and icy melodrama where passions are stylized and emotions frozen into tableaux vivants of dazzling beauty.

The final act, Quadri's murder in the forest, is of an almost unbearable brutality, made all the more chilling by its formal beauty. The sunset light filtering through the trees, the snow muffling all sound, Anna's desperate flight: everything is choreographed like a macabre ballet. Marcello, who was meant to carry out the act, remains paralyzed in the car, a voyeur of his own abjection, unable even to be the protagonist of his own evil. His fall is not tragic; it is pathetic. And it is even more so in the final scene, after the fall of the regime, when in a chaotic, nocturnal Rome, he shouts and accuses a former comrade, attempting to conform to the new order with the same desperate haste with which he embraced the last. He has learned nothing. A void cannot learn; it can only be filled by what surrounds it.

"The Conformist" is a vertiginous masterpiece because it proves that style is not an accessory to substance, but is the substance itself. It is a film that must be watched as one reads a complex text, by deciphering its symbols, analyzing its visual syntax, and grasping its implicit citations. It is proof that cinema, in its highest form, can be a tool of philosophical inquiry as powerful as any novel or essay, capable of exploring the abysses of the human soul not just through words, but through light, color, and space. A work whose formal perfection is as seductive as it is terrifying, just like the ideology it puts on screen. An immovable pillar of any self-respecting cinematic canon.