The Conformist

In 1938 Paris, Marcello completes the plan to kill his former university professor Luca Quadri. He leaves his wife Giulia in their hotel room and is collected by Special Agent Manganiello in a car to begin the mission. The act is framed as a test of his loyalty to the Fascist cause and his willingness to take a life.

A series of flashbacks shows Marcello confiding in his blind friend Italo about his hopes to marry and his attempts to join the Fascist secret police. These memories reveal the seeds of his moral compromises and foreshadow the choices that lie ahead. They illuminate how his personal life is entangled with his political ambitions.

In a decaying Rome villa, Marcello visits his morphine-addicted mother, witnessing the family’s decline. The scene underscores the cost of his world and his evolving emotional distance. It hints at the personal toll of his later public actions.

Marcello also visits his father in an insane asylum, illustrating a broken family life beneath the surface of his orderly façade. The encounter deepens the sense of fragility in his world and fuels the tension between private life and public allegiance. It sets a background of familial instability he cannot escape.

In 1917, Marcello is bullied at school until Lino intervenes as a chauffeur who shows him a pistol. Lino sexually assaults him, and Marcello partially responds before grabbing the pistol and firing into the walls and at Lino. He flees, convinced he has committed murder and is left with a haunting, silent guilt.

In another flashback, Marcello debates the necessity of confession with Giulia so their Catholic parents will permit their marriage. He goes to confession, admitting sins including the rape and supposed murder of Lino, premarital sex, and a lack of guilt. The priest absolves him after learning he works for the Fascist secret police.

In Ventimiglia, Fascist officer Raoul orders Marcello to assassinate Quadri, a move that pushes Marcello toward action. He uses his honeymoon as cover to travel to Paris with Giulia, beginning the mission under a veneer of normalcy. The instruction tightens the link between his duty and his personal life.

While visiting Quadri, now an exile in France, Marcello falls in love with Anna, Quadri’s French wife. He pursues a dangerous affair, even as Anna and Quadri are aware of his fascist loyalties. The attraction tests his political convictions against personal desire.

Anna develops a close attachment to Giulia as both wives dress extravagantly and accompany their husbands to a dance hall. The evening becomes a test of Marcello’s commitment to the Fascists, watched by Manganiello who remains skeptical of his loyalties. Tensions between love, loyalty, and politics intensify.

Marcello secretly returns the gun and informs Manganiello of Quadri’s country-house location in Savoy. The exchange cements the next phase of the assassination plot and marks Marcello’s careful, calculated approach to carrying out the mission. The setup heightens the sense of impending violence.

On a deserted alpine road, Quadri is fatally stabbed by fascist agents while Anna watches in horror. When the assailants turn on her, Anna flees toward the car for help, only to be shot as Marcello’s betrayal becomes apparent. Manganiello walks away, disgusted by Marcello’s cowardice for not shooting Anna when she fled.

By 1943, Mussolini’s resignation and the fall of the Fascist regime leave Marcello living a conventional life with Giulia and their daughter. The external change mirrors a new internal reckoning as the old certainties crumble. The country’s upheaval reframes his personal moral landscape.

While walking the streets of Rome amid celebrations, Marcello overhears two men flirting and realizes Lino survived the earlier events. He erupts, denouncing Lino as a Fascist, a homosexual, and the Quadris’ killer, while also denouncing Italo as a Fascist. An anti-Fascist crowd swirls past, taking Italo away in the unrest.

As the anti-Fascist crowd moves on, Marcello sits beside a small fire, gazing at the young man Lino had been speaking to, now nude on a bed. The scene lingers on memory and complicity, leaving unresolved tensions between his past actions and present life. It closes on the uneasy moral landscape that defines him.