FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
PARTNER (1968)
When the alienated, flighty, and surely schizophrenic Giaccobe (Pierre Clémenti) decides it's time to kill himself, the
absurd happens: he meets his doppelganger, Giaccobe. A renegade revolutionary on the lam, his double can do
everything that drama teacher Giaccobe has never been able to do. And so Giacobbe invites the other Giacobbe to
live in his mirrored closet in order to trade places when needed, leading to bizarre sequences that make Jean-Luc
Godard seem as accessible as Cameron Crowe.
That's not a stale comparison, either. Bertolucci combines a hefty amount of inspiration from Godard with his source
material, Dostoyevsky's story "The Double," to depict a character and a country split between an identity built on and
torn apart by politics. You can smell Godard in the mundane violence, the characters' free-wheeling discussions of
Marxism, and the surreal declarations and criticism of art. Beautifully transferred, it's a wonderful film to see on DVD
and the last of Bertolucci's '60s experimentations before his turn towards romantic realism.
DVD Extras: NoShame Films has really cut its teeth on this release, going so far as to include a bonus feature
(Edoardo Bruno's His Days of Glory) on the second disc. The film (also touched by Godard, as Bruno explains
in his thorough 40-minute interview) is another lost artifact of the Italian New Wave, which actually borrows a scene
from Partner to open the film. Appropriately, both films feature Pierre Clémenti and share a common political
discourse, providing an interesting historical lens to reflect on each other.
It's Bertolucci's interview that's the highlight of the DVD. The featurette finds the director at his most forthcoming. The
interview with editor Roberto Perpignani is less so, but still garners interest by explaining the technical underpinnings
of Bertolucci's vision. The 10-page collector's booklet includes four essays - the best of which written by Edoardo
Bruno - that fall into the same caliber as NoShame's previous companion booklets with sloppy, somewhat repetitive
writing. But this is a small mark against an otherwise notable DVD. Zachary Jones
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