Plot: In Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Marcello Clerici, an eager would-be member of the Party, finds himself desperate to fit in. And before long, after marrying his beautiful well-off fiancée, Giulia, the covert assassin is dispatched to Paris to liquidate his former college professor and now a subversive anti-Fascist, Luca Quadri. But there, amid uncomfortable flashbacks from his early childhood, hesitant Clerici will fall hard for his professor's alluring wife, Anna, while on his honeymoon, threatening the outcome of his mission. Is there a connection between Marcello's childhood and his inner torment?
Alternative Plot: In Mussolini's Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode -- and murder -- joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller's anthology pieces, others including Trintignant's honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim's hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest.
Rate this movie!