NoShame Films are interrupting their stream of Italian genre film releases with a pair of serious art house titles. Here's Andrew Howitt with his thoughts on Bernardo Bertolucci's Partner.
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It is good to be reminded from time to time that Bernardo Bertolucci was not always incapable of making a quality movie. With few exceptions (namely The Conformist and Besieged), I do not like the man’s films. And though I came with my unfavourable bias to my viewing of Partner, I walked away from it with the glimmer of hope that he does not always simply direct his actors with his penis in his hands.
Structurally, Partner is ambiguous and episodic with only tenuous narrative threads to drive the film forward; Bertolucci says in the 40 minute interview found amongst the extras on this disc that he hardly looked at the screenplay during shooting – I’m not saying that this is bad, but that it is evident. It’s as a character study, about an unstable young man living through the political upheaval of 1968, that the film manages to succeed. Partner centres on the paranoid and persecuted Giaccobe who meets the manifestation of his imagined doppelganger (only slightly less insipid than the real Giaccobe) and attempts to create a revolution through, um, a poorly-defined militant form of street-theatre (and Bertolucci, of course, attempts to make the parallel to his cinema). Giaccobe is strongly established early on in the film as erudite (or, at least, as a literary-pretender), as a petty revolutionary, and as the agent of a will seemingly outside of himself. Pierre Clementi is pleasurably hammy through the first act, and Bertolucci tempers this wisely through a few representative scenes of Giaccobe’s mental anguish beginning to plague him, as well as taking a moment to introduce ham-acting as a subject. So, well done, Bernardo.
Amidst the disorder, the film manages to stumble on beauty and even the sublimely comic. There is an interesting interplay between theatre and cinema that Bertolucci tinkers with throughout the film. And the striking Stefania Sandrelli makes a fingersucking cameo in a brilliantly peculiar back-seat seduction scene (accompanied by the landlord, Petrushka, making sputtering car noises while pretending to drive) that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
Bertolucci’s indebtedness to Godard is massive, from everything to the sporadic building and fading of the score to composition (think 2 or 3 Things…) to elliptic political dialogue and even to the look of the titles. In the interview with the editor, Roberto Perpignani (a fairly immodest, name-droppy kind of man, it seems), the powerful influence of the French New Wave directors on Bertolucci is made clear. But this is not really like a Godard film since it lacks any kind of direction or purpose. Though I believe that Bertolucci intended to say something about the divisive effect of a revolutionary mindset, prompting the bookish and brutal aspects of those spearheading acts of aggression to come into conflict, I don’t think Bertolucci himself understands much about Partner (in the interview he says perfunctorily that it is a “cerebral” film), but, rather, just tried to tap into the energy of the time.
So, it is, in fact, with disbelief that I applaud this film. Though Partner is not a monumental film, it certainly is interesting to see the kinds of kinks Bertolucci had to work out before being able to make masterwork, The Conformist, two years later.
No Shame has done a great job of bringing a fair bit of material to their release of Partner. The booklet is informative and well-written, with a couple pages of historical context, a detailed bio of Bertolucci, and a worthy attempt made by Richard T. Jameson to tie the film together. In addition to the 35 minute interview with Bertolucci (including some footage of the director working on set) and the interview with Perpignani, there is a second disc which carries another feature-length film, critic Edoardo Bruno’s La Sua Giornata di Gloria (His Day of Glory). Though laden with intense political debate where no agreement is reached and peopled with flimsy characters, the film’s third act is indeed worth a watch, and I think the totality, in a sort of dull, paradoxical way, makes for a captivating historical document. Bruno tells some fun stories at points over the 40 minute interview, also on the second disc.
If you’re into this sort of stuff, you’re really going to like it. For those who love Bertolucci, I have no doubt that you’ll lap up this back-catalogue title like the sweet, chunky cud it is. And you’ll have extras enough to keep you busy for some time.
Review by Andrew Howitt.