PartnerBertolucci's Nouvelle Vague-inspired take on Dostoevsky's The Double features an anarchic central performance by Pierre Clementi - "that Baudelairean satyr beloved of Bunuel, Pasolini and Garrel" (The Village Voice) - in dual roles as a disillusioned drama teacher and his unhinged doppelganger.
Shot in Rome at the time of the May '68 political rallies in Paris, Bertolucci recalls that Clementi - who would go on to appear as the sexually ambiguous chauffeur, Pasqualino, in 1970's The Conformist - returned each week to the film's set, after weekends in the French capital, with new political slogans that worked their way into the director's deliriously free-wheeling, anti-consumerist, pro-revolutionary film.
Despite the distinctly Godardian style of Partner, the film also displays Bertolucci's ongoing preoccupation with doubles, the divided self and the competing impulses between radical thought and action and moral surrender to the prevailing status quo. Given initial expression in Before the Revolution, through the character of Fabrizio, this theme would be richly elaborated in many later films by the director, most notably in The Conformist and 1900.
New 35mm print.
