Partner.

Interesting and amusing surrealist movie, although perhaps too long. It has many funny moments, bizarre and nonsense situations and dialogs, experiments with sounds, nice art direction and colourful cinematography, immersive soundtrack. I loved the shadows' scene, a very cartoonish one.

While the often noticed aping by Bertolucci of his hero Godard in this early film is quite true (even the film itself admits its debt to Godard right on screen), there is more here than mere imitation. Whether intentional or not I saw plenty of other influences from Bunuel, to the paintings if Rene Magritte. A loose, examination of schizophrenia; an inhibited intellectual young man spawns a separate self who is confident, aggressive and revolutionary.

While vaguely based on Dostoyevsky's "The Double", this is very much it's own story, and a hell of a lot of fun. I found Bertolucci's surreal playfulness more inviting than most of Godard's work from that period. It asks many of the same questions, and has much of the same distain for modern consumer society, (and film narrative conventions) but does it with an absurdist sense of humor that give rise to some moments that now seem as much "Monty Python" as they are French New Wave.

The most egregious Godard rip-offs can be annoying (sudden inappropriate music, etc), but they are for the most part mercifully brief. Mostly this is more influence and homage than theft, and creates a time capsule that still has relevance and interest, and pleasure in the watching. Pierre Clementi does a fine job playing the two different versions of the hero Giaccobe.

"Bertolucci's juvenilia, his Venice Golden Lion-nominated third feature PARTNER, made when he was 28, released months after the May 68 unrest, is an antisocial, subversive manifesto re-moulded out of Dostoevsky's novella "The Double" and has the Vietnamese flag prominently featured in it.

Clémenti plays Giacobbe, a young college professor, cynical, unstable, romantically frustrated, even psychotic and homicidal, meets his alter ego. Like two peas in a pod, they live together in Giacobbe's book-stacked apartment, but dissimilar to Dostoevsky's text, PARTNER doesn't overtly demarcate their disparate personalities, for most of the time, audience cannot tell which Giacobbe is present when only one of them is shown. "

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After that it degenerates into an exercise in employing old art film cliches. Though he bases his movie on the Dostoyevsky story 'The Double', Bertolucci apparently has no message, and no original way to present it. By the end this movie has dragged you through a tedium of stupidity and indulgence. This is the kind of film that gives art movies a bad name. 4/10

Movie making is a form of expression that has in recent years been subject to a mold of narrative. The Partner is a genuine example of a film that does not comform to the standard. As always Bertolucci was able to draw performances that transform t characters he created into tangable moments. Particularly remarkable is Pierre Clementi's performance of a man with two identities. Made at the early age of 22, this film is a window into an artist mind. Open your mind and just allow yourself to enjoy the ride.