Fundamentally, this movie at #118 is a portrait of a kinda weird antihero — it’s Mussolini’s Italy, and he decides to become a Fascist informer. Not (as an interview scene makes clear) for material gain or deep-seated ideological belief, but simply that he wants to be normal. But since he is in fact not normal, he doesn’t want to be normal in the normal way, he wants to be the most normal, intensely normal. And so he doesn’t just go along with Fascist politics, he joins the secret police.

This is also why he’s getting married to an aggressively normie woman, and the fundamental paradox of their relationship is that he holds her in absolute contempt, but also clearly envies her, because she is able to be effortlessly normal in a way that he can’t manage even while trying as hard as he can.

He might also hold her in contempt because he may or may not be gay; the movie opens with him having a (semi-consensual — which is to say, clearly non-consensual to a modern eye, but midcentury Italy was really weird, and it’s really friggin’ hard to tell whether they mean anything to actually be non-consensual just because it was clearly depicted that way) homosexual encounter as a kid, and then apparently murdering the other guy; it doesn’t take a lot of connecting-the-dots to tie this childhood trauma to his adult fetishization of conformity.

The core of the movie’s story is a trip to Paris, where he’s supposed to spy on an old professor of his and gain his confidence. He does that just fine, but in the process also falls in love with the professor’s wife (who meanwhile tries to start up a relationship with his wife). At a certain point, he passes information to his Fascist buddies about a trip the professor is taking, and then tries really hard to convince the wife not to go with him, knowing that they’re going to intercept him and murder the professor. But despite her promises to stay in Paris with him, she ends up going with the professor. When he discovers this, he gets in a car to chase after her (which is actually one of the first scenes we see; the movie is told a-chronologically), where he’s going to try to…

Spoilers

… well, that sentence doesn’t really have an ending, because when he finally does catch up to the professor and his wife, what he actually does is just sit in his car and watch as the professor is killed, and then when she comes running to his window and bangs on it asking for help, he does nothing at all, neither trying to save her nor to kill her, just sits there passively as she runs away and is killed by the other Fascists.

The last scene of the movie happens a few years later, as we hear that Mussolini’s regime is being toppled. We get a scene with our hero and his wife, who it turns out has started to develop a little contempt of her own for him. And then he goes out into the street where (in a massive coincidence) he encounters that guy from his childhood homosexual encounter, not dead after all. His reaction to this is to loudly denounce him as a Fascist, and to shout out to random bystanders that the guy got that professor killed.

I’m a little torn about this movie, because if it’s just supposed to be a portrait of this one fucked-up dude and his peculiar psychology, I think it works well. But given the explicitly political nature of the film and the title and that very on-the-nose 180 at the end of the movie, it feels like it’s maybe trying to do a banality of evil thing; if so, it’s less successful. But it feels weird to criticize a movie for not succeeding at something that it may not even be trying to do, you know?

At any rate, it’s worth noting that a lot of the praise for this movie is for its cinematography, and sure enough it is gorgeous. Ultimately, my take on this movie is that it’s almost perfectly placed where it is: It’s the kind of mid-century (it was made in 1970) European arthouse movie that’s really at the center of this whole list in a lot of ways, and it’s good, but it’s clearly not a real top-tier film. So whereas some of the recent movies I’ve watched in this neighborhood have been peak exemplars of other genres (Jaws as a paradigmatic blockbuster; Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a paradigmatic slasher), this is legitimately just like the fiftieth-or-so best movie of its type.