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Though looking at just two films is hardly enough to discern a pattern, it is still interesting to see that a theme running through two very different Italian films made almost three decades apart is in both cases an elevation of non-conformism in a sick society. Both award-winners, the 1970 film The Conformist and the 1997 film Life is Beautiful both chronicle World War II-era fascism in Italy and examine the moral responsibilities of the individual in the midst of an immoral and anti-individualistic system.
Both films spend a significant amount of narrative emphasis on the rise of fascism in Italy. The Conformist, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, shows the career of its anti-hero Marcello beginning in 1938 in Rome; Life is Beautiful, written and directed by Roberto Benigni, shows the career of its hero Guido beginning in 1939 in Arezzo, Tuscany. Though Marcello marries a woman he does not truly love, Guido marries a woman he adores – for the tone of these two movies are in striking contrast, as too are their levels of realism. The main characters are also at opposite poles: the latter is brave, the former cowardly, or perhaps more precisely the latter is generous, the former selfish. And so the cautionary tale The Conformist is a melancholic and damning drama about selling your soul, while the comedy-drama Life is Beautiful aims to be a kind of fable about the power of the little guy and of faith.
The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both have the same central, compelling, dramatic premise: will the protagonist save the lives of the people he cares about? In The Conformist, he is smitten with Anna Quadri, and he also has respect and affection for her husband, his old philosophy professor. Yet he knows (since he works for the secret police) that they are targets for assassination for their subversive activities. Thus, the main thrust of the film is suspense over whether he will allow them to be killed. In Life is Beautiful, Guido devotes himself in the second half of the movie to trying to keep his wife and son alive despite the whole family’s internment in a Nazi camp. Despite Guido’s tactic of pretending to his young son Joshua that it is all a game, the film has tremendous suspense, because of course the audience knows what the true horror of the situation is and how fraught with peril at every moment.
Propaganda is accepted in the Italian cities in both movies, for instance: near the start of The Conformist, the protagonist’s friend Italo records a speech on radio about how wonderful it is that Italy and Germany are uniting forces, and one of the ways Guido courts Dora early on in Life is Beautiful is to impersonate an inspector who otherwise would have given the schoolchildren a straight lecture about their inherent racial superiority. We also see how the fascist bureaucracy controls the economic success of the citizenry in both films. Marcello and Guido each enter the huge, impersonal, cavernous offices of their city governments to assure their livelihoods.
Marcello has some arrogance and cruelty that makes him a good fit with the intolerant and bullying side of fascism – he despises what he calls his mother’s “decadence”, for instance, and has her Japanese chauffeur beaten up and sent away; he torments his father when he visits him in an asylum. But he tends to resist the fascist bent of his country in only small gestures: he leans away from his fascist friend Italo, he tries to wave away Agent Manganiello who pursues him about the mission.
By contrast, Guido is cleanly opposed to fascism, and his whole personality is the antithesis of it. He is fundamentally egalitarian in spirit – from a lower class than Marcello, he is also without disdain or pomposity. We initially meet him driving through the countryside in a run-down car with failing brakes alongside a working-class friend. When they arrive in Arezzo, they share a bed for the savings. From the start of his family, Guido paints a kind of fairy tale atmosphere. He dotes on both his wife and son and upholds togetherness. Whereas Marcello was always dissatisfied, Guido makes his own happiness even in the face of nightmarish oppression.
In The Conformist, Marcello does seem to have a conscience, but he lacks actual principles. He knows an assassination of someone who doesn’t deserve it is pending, and he spends a lot of the movie moping about it. At one he tries to give the gun back to the Agent -- but his attempts to refuse to participate are half-hearted.
In Life is Beautiful, Guido is the exact opposite: he’s all principles and self-sacrifice in the second half of the movie, which is full of daring actions he undertakes at the death camp just to keep his son and wife Dora’s spirits up. In the more comedic first half, he does break rules – and eggs – but he does not do it out of spitefulness. Sometimes it is just accidental, Chaplinesque slapstick – taking someone else’s hat, for instance – but the butts of the jokes are, like in Chaplin’s films, members of a mean-spirited and snobbish over-class. And the clowing is gracefully executed by Roberto Benigni, a highly-skilled physical comedian.
The screenplay for The Conformist is shrewd because in it Marcello’s obsession with conformity precedes his political compromises. He talks about normality quite often, from his conversation with his friend about impending marriage (and how he wants it to make him normal) to his reluctant confession in church, when he tells the priest that he intends to “construct” his “normality” by paying a debt to society. Because the fascists now rule Italy, he thinks he can hide what he feels is his abnormality by making a firm commitment to the dominant ideology in joining OVRA, the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism. For almost two decades, he has felt intense guilt and shame around the accidental murder of a chauffeur when he was 13 (which he has kept secret), and he believes that “blood atones for blood,” as if two wrongs can somehow magically make a right.
In opposition, Guido fully embraces being abnormal in Life is Beautiful. He is a kind of innocent Pierrot who sees everything from a fresh and imaginative perspective -- which may be why he is able to commit to viewing even the darkest and most dysfunctional environment through the eyes of a hopeful child. He does not spend time worrying about where he fits into society -- when he is a poor waiter trying to romance Dora, a schoolteacher whose current fiancé has much more money, it does not discourage him. He still does what he can. When, as fascism starts growing in his town, he starts observing the vile graffiti all over that vilifies his people, he takes an uncle’s white horse that has been painted bile-green and covered in anti-Semitic graffiti, and rides that horse into a hotel ballroom gala and chivalrously spirits the willing Dora away.
The helpless, sulking Marcello, a passive protagonist, has already lost himself well before the harrowing climax of The Conformist. (At dinner, two women discuss whether he ever smiles and decide he doesn’t, but that is “his nature.” Petulantly, Marcello disagrees: “That’s not my nature!” This suggests that he feels at odds with what he projects, that he would like, perhaps, to be less tormented.) By contrast, in Life is Beautiful, the very active protagonist Guido seems to be exactly who he wants to be, and stays true to his independence and inner resilience despite ordeals much worse than Marcello’s.
Marcello is so passive that he does not even drive himself to the assassination ambush, Agent Manganiello drives him and he sits in the back, where he dozes off. Awaking, he shares a dream that he was blind and that Manganiello drove him to Switzerland for an operation by Professor Quadri, who restored him to sight. This is evidently inspired by the conversation Marcello had at the professor’s about Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the professor links the takeover of Italy by fascist ideology to the inability of the prisoners in the cave to see reality or even to recognize unreality. Marcello has internalized the idea that the anti-fascist professor could help him to see again, and this shows that Marcello doesn’t really believe in fascism. (Switzerland is also important in the dream because it was ostensibly neutral in both world wars.) At the end of the dream, Marcello found true love -- a soothing wish fulfillment for him. But he never does anything to make it happen in real life. In fact, he merely allows the antithesis to come true.
Ultimately, the only active things Marcello does are all soul-denying gestures to “construct” his “normality”, and when in the end of the film politics have done an about-face, he turns former friends over to the mob and denounces them as fascists – only because suddenly the safest thing to be anti-fascist. He is still imprisoned in himself and unsure of his identity; and we can see that in the closing image as he turns to look at us through a gate’s iron bars. He is still a conformist.
There is also some philosophy in Life is Beautiful, and it goes right to the core of the difference between being passive and active. While trying to get some sleep one night, Guido’s pal explains to him that he uses willpower to fall asleep, and cites the philosopher Schopenhaeur’s ideas as the inspiration. Thereafter, Guido consciously uses willpower to try to make things happen in the external world that he desires, starting with a visit to the opera where he wills Dora to turn from her expensive box seat (where she is on a date) to look at him below in the cheap seats. This all lays the groundwork for the bold coup that Guido pulls off over the course of the family’s internment in the camp. He uses willpower to convince his son Joshua to stay hidden by day in the barracks every day at the camp, and to prevent Joshua from despairing. Guido’s very active approach is a tremendous gift of love.
Though they take vastly different approaches, The Conformist and Life is Beautiful both show the value of resistance against depraved authority. They uphold the individual as the seat of morality, and portray the importance to an individual of seeing clearly and of having the will to follow one’s conscience. Ultimately, each of these movies revolves around the rejection of conformity for its own sake, and the elevation of non-conformity as a muscle to train and prepare. Both movies illustrate that the non-conformist is beautiful.
