Want to touch on two beautiful films by European directors.  The first is Bertolucci’s “The Conformist.”  It is a wonderful 1970 film set in Fascist Italy of the 1930s, much of it filmed at EUR in Rome, using surviving Mussolini era architecture.

The movie is a political drama, about the rise of fascism in Italy, and the fact that many of those who joined the movement where people looking for a way to “belong.”   We see this through the personal trauma of the protagonist, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who did not want to be “different” and sought comfort in a mass political movement.   The film combines political philosophy and lyricism.  The cinematography is the best ever.   In one scene, in a shadowed room in Paris, Clerici is explaining Plato’s “prisoners in a cave” analogy:  people are like ancients chained  in a cave, only able to see shadows on the cave wall.  They, like modern man,  know nothing about the real causes of the shadows.   Men can be misled by images: of flags, marches, and massive architecture.  Fascism was not really about ideology but the human condition.

Also interesting to me was Clerici’s historical perspective, made to a colleague, that the fascists were looking for, and found, the perfect counter revolution to both the democrats and proletarians.   At the end, there is the eerie, beautifully filmed scene of the assassination of an Italian political exile living in France, filmed in the Alps, with shadowy figures coming out of the misty woods to conduct the Caesar style assassination, with numerous Brutus like characters stabbing the dissident.   The past, as Faulkner said, is not really past.   The film also used Clerici to show what happened to the fascists in Italy at war’s end, filtering away when things were falling apart, like rats, blending back into society.  Overall, “The Conformist” was useful in depicting another version of fascism: less extreme perhaps than the Nazis, more stylish and intellectual, but equally dangerous and destructive

The second film is “Blue,” is by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, from his Three Colors set.  Filmed in 1993, “Blue” is a slow paced, internal, beautiful French film, centered around the main character, Julie (Juliet Binoche), who loses her family in a car accident and reacts by cutting off her emotions, her feelings, and her past.  She tries to isolate herself, selling the house and moving into a downtown apartment with no nameplate, avoiding connections and old friends, and living  anonymously.  Julie is invisible and totally free (“Blue” stands for liberty), living on coffee and swimming, merely existing.   The film has a great texture, an organic feel:  her running her knuckles along a stone wall in Paris, a French country estate with rustic courtyard and stone fireplace, the deep blue water at evening in the olympic pool of the health club, the natural colors of Parisian rooftops, parks, and street markets.  There is the magical background score, a new symphony for European integration, the music following her finger as she traces the score on the sheet.  The music was composed by her late husband prior to the accident.  Music she had stored away, not wanting to be reminded.

In the end, Julie discovers she cannot cut off from others as she had tried.  She can not just exist without others, without love, compassion, and suffering that accompanies them.  Otherwise, there is no meaning in life.   Music, too, has to be alive, not suppressed.  Finally, she brings her late husband’s symphony out of storage to the awaiting musical world, realizing people have to connect, let go, not shut off, reach out to others.  They have to confront loss, not choose denial.  It is about connection.  Music connects, too, as we see.