Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista is a monument in the history of cinema. The chance to see it on the big screen of the attractively retro main hall of the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring certainly makes a trip to one of the least hospitable corners in the Washington suburbs, Colesville Rd. and Georgia Ave., worth the aggravation.

The film still impresses by its aesthetic beauty, the work of legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, which is in seeming disaccord with the chilling story the film recounts (the screenplay, by Bertolucci on the novel by Alberto Moravia, was nominated for an Academy Award). As a tale of reckless moral compromise under a paranoid, totalitarian state, it has influenced many later dystopic cautionary tales. We will see the vast, empty marble palaces of this film’s fascist architecture again, under slightly different guises, in Brazil and even the futuristic Gattaca.

Here our everyman, normal on the surface and twisted by the circumstances of life, is the disturbingly impassive Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who takes his fascist leanings several steps too far by agreeing to work for the Italian secret police. Trintignant, who was also the hypocritical face of arch-Catholic morality in Ma nuit chez Maud from Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, is a terrifying cipher, impeccably dressed in his suit and hat. In a hilarious confession scene, he recounts the sins of his life to a shocked priest, submitting to a ritual of forgiveness that he finds absurd only because he wants to create a “normal life” with his future wife. In the closing scenes, after having engineered the cold-blooded murder of an anti-fascist philosophy professor and his wife, Clerici turns on his friends and fellow fascists, changing political sympathies because Mussolini has been deposed.