Loosely based on the short 1846 novella The Double by Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Partner played at the 29th Venice Film Festival and the Fortnight Directors of the 22nd Cannes Film Festival.
Partner is the third feature by Bertolucci, who was only 27 when he made it, and his age and the youthful energy that goes with it are manifest in every frame of the picture.
For some reason, it is one of the less shown and less discussed movies in Bertolucci’s oeuvre.
Grade: B
Partner | |
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The screenplay, by Bertolucci and Gianni Amico, is freely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s short novel, “The Double,” about an ineffectual young man who is taken over—and ultimately driven to madness—by his alter ego, who seems to be able to do all the things that he cannot.
This film follows a college student who has a routine life and who encounters a twin he is not related to. In the process, he discovers that the twin friend has many qualities that he doesn’t have.
In Bertolucci’s movie, the young man (Clémenti) is a drama teacher and his alter ego (also Clémenti) is a sort of supernatural Julian Beck who proclaims: “The only duty of a man of the theater is to make theater.”
Bertolucci relates to the material as an intellectual poet, qualities that he had acquired from his father and from his friendship with the poet and director Pasolini.
A zeitgeist movie, Partner reflects the revolutionary times, and Bertolucci’s version is that of a youthful and even romantic politics. The theater serves as a metaphor for the world, whose spectacle must be world revolution.
His object of desire, Clara (the beautiful Stefania Sandrelli) can’t keep from lovingly biting his fingers. Another rather girl (Tina Aumont) arrives at his apartment selling detergents (“We live in a time of the decline of soap powders,” she says) and offers herself to him.
Every element in the film is either ironic or upside-down–and also open to multiple and diverse meanings. Thus, the young man’s plan to stage a revolutionary spectacle in the streets fizzles when his performers fail to show up.
It would take another two years for Bertolucci to make his first, universally acknowledged masterpiece, The Conformist, in 1970.
Cast
Pierre Clémenti as Giacobbe I and II
Stefania Sandrelli as Clara
Tina Aumont as the seller of detergent
Sergio Tofano as Petrushka
Ninetto Davoli as the student
Credits:
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Produced by Giovanni Bertolucci
Written by Gianni Amico and Bertolucci
Music by Ennio Morricone
Cinematography Ugo Piccone
Edited by Roberto Perpignani
Release date: 1968