The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, February 3, 2017 — 5

‘The Conformist’ and the 
merits of character study

1970s film’s pertinent subject matter tackles diverse topics 
from homosexuality to fascism, fashioning itself a timeless feature

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The 

Conformist” seems to sneer 
at everything it celebrates. 
It 
mocks 
the 

excesses of the 
interbellum 
bourgeoisie yet 
revels 
in 
the 

beauty of 1930s 
Paris. It’s one of 
the most beautiful films ever 
made that takes one of the 
darkest times in history as 
its subject: Europe’s descent 
into fascism and World War 
II. It evokes this world with 
splendor, and, for the work 
of a Marxist, seems less 
concerned with details and 
conditions of history than its 
lost beauty. Its aesthetic and 
political ambitions wrestle. 
Ambiguity abounds.

An adaptation of Alberto 

Moravia’s 
novel, 
the 
film 

follows 
Marcello 
Clerici. 

He’s a middle-aged, upper-
class Italian man, a bit of 
an intellectual and an agent 
of the OVRA, the Italian 
version of the Gestapo. He’s 
on assignment by the Fascist 
secret police to travel to Paris 
and assassinate his former 
professor, Luca Quadri, an 
anti-fascist 
dissident 
who 

emigrated away from Benito 
Mussolini’s regime.

Marcello craves normalcy 

— whatever that is — and 
hopes to find security and 
stability in the banality of 
middle-class 
life. 
Indeed, 

to be normal seems the only 
desire he has — or at least the 
only one he’ll admit. So he 
marries the dullest bourgeois 
girl he can find and drags her 
off to Paris where he can kill 
two birds — his honeymoon 
and Quadri.

A 
series 
of 
memories, 

it’s told as Marcello and 
Manganiello follow the car 
of Quadri and his wife, Anna, 
with whom Marcello has an 

affair, in order to finish the 
job. Pre-Vichy Paris, not yet 
stained by collaboration, is 
the site of most of the action, 
and rather than a historical 
representation of the city, 
Bertolucci 
evokes 
a 
city 

inscribed 
with 
posterity’s 

imagination. 
Captured 
in 

rich, 
distorted 

chiaroscuros 
of red and blue, 
Bertolucci’s 
Paris 
is 
a 

dream and gives the film the 
expressionistic flare which 
has earned praise from many 
critics.

In 
Paris 
the 
object 
of 

Marcello’s desires appears to 
have been found. He walks 
down the Champs-Elysees, 
while his wife window-shops 
with Quadri’s wife, Anna, 
with whom Marcello has an 
affair. The quartet goes to 
dinner, and later dancing.

But no matter what he does, 

Marcello is not a normal man. 
With a syphilitic father in a 
madhouse and a morphine-
addicted 
mother, 
to 
be 

normal seems a reasonable 
desire. Moreover, when he 
was a school-boy, he was 
picked up by a chauffeur, 
Lino, who, promising to show 
him a pistol, takes Marcello 
to his apartment and makes 
sexual 
advances 
toward 

him, which are not initially 
rejected. Marcello grabs the 
pistol, 
shoots 
wildly 
and 

flees what he believes to be a 
murder scene. Tally up these 
aberrations from regular life 
and normalcy becomes an 
increasingly attractive home.

The film seems to offer 

Marcello’s 
repression 
of 

his homosexual desires as 
a neat explanation for his 
collaboration with the fascist 
state. Or, at the very least, 
fascism gives some form of 
absolution for whatever their 
sins — if not for the believers, 
then for those who abide by it. 
In an early scene, where this 
adolescent episode is first 

shown, Marcello reveals his 
attempted murder to a Roman 
priest during confession. But 
he finds little resolution in 
the clemency of the church. 
It’s the state, rather, that 
becomes a home for him, 
and it legitimizes him and 
overwhelms 
his 
moral 

reservations.

As he spends time with 

the 
Quadris, 
it 
becomes 

increasingly 
evident 
that 

Marcello might not be capable 
of killing them. Manganiello 
attempts 
to 
slap 
a 
little 

courage into him, but it’s 
ineffective. When they finally 
catch up to the couple, there’s 
an accident — a car runs into 
the Quadris. A group of fascist 
agents emerges from the other 
car, stabs and kills Quadri, 
while Anna runs to the car 
waiting a few meters away. 
As Marcello watches Anna 
scream for her life through 
his window, he refuses to look 
at her. The distance between 
the killers and Marcello slims. 
The lesson is clear: After 
fascism takes hold, there is 
no normal, and complicity 
doesn’t absolve.

But even then, when it 

seems resolved into a firm 
political position, the film 
retains its strangeness. The 
film hardly means whatever 
it claims — it’s too complex 
to 
merely 
equate 
sexual 

repression 
and 
political 

violence. If the film cannot 
reconcile 
the 
competition 

between art and politics, it 
does not needlessly sew them 
together.

In the final scenes of the 

film after Mussolini’s fall 
from power, Marcello sees 
Lino for the second time, 
now seducing another young 
man. 
He 
denounces 
him 

publicly as a homosexual and 
a fascist. After then publicly 
denouncing his friend Italo, a 
blind man and former Fascist 
broadcaster, Marcello gazes 
at the body of Lino’s would-
be partner. Ideology cannot 
corrupt everything.

20TH CENTURY FOX

!

KARL WILLIAMS

Daily Arts Wrtier

Reflections on Philip Glass

We all agreed that it was 

probably the least interesting 
concert we had ever attended. 
Utterly lacking in variety and 
generally monochromatic, the 
cyclical nature of the music 
failed to capture our attention, 
the repetitive patterns seemed 
to lack even a flicker of the 
creative flame and there were 
more than a few 
moments which I 
personally 
found 

to 
be 
soporific 

in a literal sense. 
The best part was 
probably when we 
snapped 
a 
photo 

with 
that 
guy 

who 
looked 
like 

(but 
wasn’t) 
the 

Grateful 
Dead’s 

Bob Weir.

This took place 

around two years 
ago 
now, 
and 

the event in question was a 
performance by the composer 
Philip Glass and a violinist 
whose name I don’t remember. 
They played a handful of music 
by the first of the pair, as a sort 
of preview for an upcoming 
opera of Glass’s that was being 
staged at the same venue, UNC 
Greensboro. I and two of my 
close friends — a composer 
and a jazz guitarist/composer 
— attended on a whim, driving 
from where we studied half-
an-hour away in order to 
see a man who is perhaps 
the best-known composer of 
contemporary classical music 
in America. None of us really 
loved Glass’s music — at the 
time we were more enamored 
of people like Gesualdo, and 
might have also been prone to 
worship at the altar of Webern 
— but none of us expected to be 
as tremendously dissatisfied as 
we were.

In between pieces Glass 

spoke about his music into a 
microphone, mumbling almost 
indiscernibly. 
I 
distinctly 

recall something about him 
writing a piece “about 10 
years ago now, in 1990.” After 
the concert there was a table 
selling Glass’s recent memoir, 
“Words Without Music.” We 
walked past it.

All of which sounds rather 

harsh. And I suppose it is, 
but that’s how I felt at the 
time. In the years since, my 
tone has softened on Glass, 
but he remains a composer 
about whom I am supremely 
ambivalent. Over the past few 
days I’ve been thinking more 
deeply about him and his legacy 
— prompted in no small part by 
the pageantry surrounding his 
80th birthday this week — and 
it has had a clarifying effect. In 
short, I may not be enthused 
about his work, but I’m very 
comfortable with his removal 
from my “List of Composers I 

Hate” (a perdition to which J.P. 
Sousa is forever damned), and a 
bit disappointed in myself that 
it took so long.

Starting in the ‘60s, Glass 

— along with composers like 
Terry Riley, Steve Reich and La 
Monte Young — was among the 
first to develop a musical style 
which has come to be known 

as 
“minimalism,” 

music 
characterized 

by 
simple, 
slow-

changing 
and 

repetitive 
patterns. 

One 
of 
the 
only 

major 
movements 

of American origin 
within the classical 
music 
tradition, 
it 

appropriately 
draws 

from a variety of non-
classical 
influences: 

from 
contemporary 

American pop music 
it 
took 
its 
simple, 

consonant chord progressions, 
from Ravi Shankar and Indian 
classical music it took its 
concept of time, from west 
Africa it took some of its 
rhythmic inspiration.

Glass himself has undeniably 

had 
a 
profound 
musical 

influence, 
especially 
in 

America. Perhaps more than 
anyone else he embodied the 
trends of postmodern music 
in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and he 
crossed over into the public 
awareness like nobody else in 
his generation. He became a 
household name in the way that 
Stravinsky did a few generations 
earlier and no one has since. 
Many of the composers active 
today 
— 
both 
of 
younger 

and 
older 
generations 
— 

openly 
acknowledge 
their 

indebtedness 
to 
him 
(such 

as 
Nico 
Muhly, 
whom 
I 

interviewed 
in 
2015 
for 

this 
publication, 
or 
John 

Adams, with whom I spoke 
in 
September). 
I 
suppose 

even my own music has been 
touched by his hand — I wrote 
my first vaguely “minimalist” 
composition while in Paris last 
summer (studying as part of a 
program modelled after one of 
Glass’s own teachers, the great 
Nadia Boulanger), though its 
stylistic differences from Glass 
are significant.

But Glass’s reach isn’t limited 

to the classical music world. 
Over the last week popular 
figures from Paul Simon to 
Laurie Anderson, both of whom 
have collaborated with Glass, 
have been lauding him in the 
press. And in this I think can 
be seen one of Glass’s greatest 
strengths; he doesn’t confine 
himself to just his little corner 
of art. Throughout his career 
Glass has consistently engaged 
with other artists to create new 
works together. And this is true 
in areas outside of music — he 
has collaborated with the poet 

Allen Ginsberg on opera, with 
film director Martin Scorsese 
for his beautiful “Kundun,” 
with director Godfrey Reggio 
on “Koyaanisqatsi” and with 
countless others on any number 
of projects. And, at least to me, 
it’s when Glass is working in 
these dramatic media that he 
is at his strongest as a creator. 
Some 
of 
his 
instrumental 

music might make me feel 
like peeling my epidermis, but 
throw in a libretto and some 
choreography and the music is 
transformed into an engaging 
and 
meditative 
experience 

like no other (see: the opera 
“Einstein on the Beach”).

Part of Glass’s appeal can 

certainly be traced to these 
collaborations, but it also comes 
from the fact that his music 
proved to be a democratization 
of sorts. When he first came 
to prominence — and broad 
public popularity — he and the 
minimalist 
movement 
were 

seen as an alternative to the 
abstract and elitist approach 
of modernist composers like 
Elliott 
Carter 
and 
Milton 

Babbitt, who were generally 
locked away in offices on 
ivy-covered 
campuses 
with 

impressive names, inaccessible. 
But Glass — and Reich, and 
Riley — were easy to grasp on 
to, unpretentious and hip. And 
like much of the American 
avant-garde — musical, literary 
or otherwise — they dabbled in 
Buddhist and Zen philosophy, 
making them appealing to the 
New Age crowd which was 
rapidly forming.

My own first encounter with 

Glass’s music came sometime in 
middle school. I was spending 
my summer in the mountains 
of Colorado with my family, 
attending my first live concerts 
at the Breckenridge Music 
Festival and generally savoring 
existence. At a garage sale, 
my mother found a CD of his 
third symphony and “The Civil 
Wars Suite,” and immediately 
suggested we buy it. In a past 
life, Mom was herself one of 
these New Age types, and had 
come to love Glass when she 
lived in the Ginsberg-betrodden 
hippie town of Boulder, my 
birthplace. 
For 
her 
26th 

birthday she had even made 
the trip out to San Francisco 
to see his opera “Satyagraha,” 
a work in Sanskrit (who does 
that?) about the life of Gandhi. 
On our drive down from the 
mountains, we listened to the 
CD we had found, the evocative 
music perfectly accompanying 
the winding road and rugged 
landscape.

I hated it. Sorry, Mom. I 

hated it.

But check back with me in 

a few years — the way this is 
going, by then I’ll probably 
have canonized the man.

DAYTON 

HARE

Senior Arts Editor

CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN
FROM THE VAULT

“The Conformist”

20th Century Fox

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Kehlani’s debut a success

MUSIC REVIEW

Kehlani’s 
debut 
album 

SweetSexySavage 
contains 

exactly what the title might hint 
at, but it’s more 
than that. With 
17-tracks and no 
features, 
it’s 
a 

sprawling record, 
one 
that 
can 

easily hypnotize 
with luscious R&B rhythms 
and the singer’s effortless cool, 
leaving a listener lost among 
the pink clouds floating behind 
Kehlani. But be warned, it’s an 
inferior experience to move 
through SSS delicately. You 
won’t 
fully 
appreciate 
her 

perspective — she’s a young 
woman who knows what she 
wants, what she doesn’t and 
that both of those things are 
constantly changing.

Sonically, 
SweetSexySavage 

stands on its own with Kehlani’s 
singular style; moments across 
the record, however, recall a 
long list of artists who came 
before her: Beyonce, Rihanna, 
Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill, 
who’s 
prominently 
seen 

tattooed to Kehlani’s left arm 
on the album cover. And those 
are just a few.

SSS would as a whole benefit 

from some cutting, but there 
are more than enough moments 
of pop, R&B and hip-hop glory 

to 
forgive 
the 

occasional 
skip. 

The 
spoken 

introduction 
— 

one of the album’s 
highlights 
— 

opens with “My 

condolences to those who have 
lost me” (Savage? Check.) and 
ends with “For still searching 
for someone to understand 
me better.” And just as the 
final echo of the intro hits the 
eardrum, the irresistible bass 
line of “Keep On” grooves in.

SweetSexySavage 
is 

undeniably front-loaded. The 
first verse on “Distraction” 
boasts Yonce-levels of swag — 
the nation should be begging 
to be Kehlani’s distraction. 
“Undercover” 
interpolates 

lyrics 
from 
Akon’s 
“Don’t 

Matter” with an ease that 
should crown Kehlani the new 
age queen of R&B, and if that 
doesn’t, the line “I’ma tweet 
our inside jokes to the outside 

world” might. And lead single 
“CRZY” embodies all of SSS’s 
strongest qualities: exquisite 
cross-genre 
production, 

cutting, confident lyrics and 
soaring choruses that are easy 
to catch on to without bordering 
on dull.

The album’s latter half would 

benefit from a few cuts, but 
nonetheless still holds some 
of the album’s most striking 
material. The cool distance of 
“Do U Dirty” ’s verses sets up the 
emotive delivery of, “Swear you 
see the good in me” to abruptly 
shift gears only to shift back 
again. 
The 
instrumentation 

of “Get Like” and flow of “In 
My Feelings” rank among the 
album’s most velvety moments 
and the breakdown on “Too 
Much” is too much.

The sexiness and savagery 

are finished by the time the 
final track, “Thank You” rolls 
in. With a backing chorus, 
Kehlani thanks everyone who 
has helped her along the way, 
but let me just say, “No, Kehlani. 
Thank you.” SweetSexySavage 
is a powerhouse of a debut. 
Sonically cohesive and lyrically 
on-brand from start to finish, 
Kehlani has staked her claim.

CHRISTIAN KENNEDY

Daily Arts Wrtier

SweetSexySavage

Kehlani

Atlantic Records

