THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

An elusive mystery across unresolved Oedipal terrain, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno weaves a tapestry two of whose strands are Freudianism and anti-Fascism. Legend and historical myth fill in a young man’s “memory” of his father where there is no basis for firsthand memory of this father, whose shadow nevertheless becomes increasingly hard for the son to grapple with. Athos Magnani, whose father also was named Athos Magnani, plays Hamlet as he investigates the assassination, before he was born, of his heroic anti-Fascist father during the war. (A researcher, Athos is an academic version of a detective.) His father was killed, presumably by Fascists, at much the same age as Athos is now.
     Invited by his father’s mistress, Athos enters Tara, a rural village outside Parma, where a street and a public square are named after his father—tauntingly, that is, not named after him. The bust of his father in the square is a mocking mirror. (Both Athos Magnanis are played by the same actor, Giulio Brogi.) Athos is probably unconscious of his motive for this journey into his father’s past. He has come to “take down” his father, debunk him, to discover the unborrowed light of his own identity.
     Bertolucci spins a web weaving together the present and fragments of the past; in this past, characters appear as they do in the present, no younger, because Agnos’s “flashbacks” are bound to his own current experience of the people involved. These include the mistress and his father’s three anti-Fascist compatriots, with whom the father plotted the assassination of Mussolini, whose impending visit to Tara was publicized. Can the father’s heroism be doubted? In an extraordinary passage, among Bertolucci’s finest, the playing of the Fascist anthem at a public dance is boldly and baldly hijacked by Athos Sr. when he grabs an unattached woman in attendance and takes her to the dance floor; they are the only couple there, riveting all eyes (including ours), subordinating the offensive music to the spectacle of the dance. The father’s fierce allegiance to the anti-Fascist cause is manifest.
     Still, alternative narrative webs are spun, in one of which the father is treacherous, betraying the cause; is it possible that his own compatriots rather than Fascists assassinated him? In either case, his heroism, true or false, has become the unmovable stuff of legend, inadvertently shutting off the possibility of resolution of his son’s Oedipal complex. Indeed, Athos Sr. may have engineered his own martyrdom, to shore up communal anti-Fascist sentiment as replacement for the planned assassination of Mussolini that was doomed to fail, assassination for assassination, unforeseen fallout of which is his son’s crisis and predicament. But enrobing such a spiderweb of deceit and manipulation may be the son’s own: perhaps what we are “seeing” is the son’s fantasy of destroying his father, followed by the securing of his father’s martyrdom as the son’s self-inflicted punishment for his filial transgression, and once again rendering the resolution of his Oedipal crisis impossible. Fixed unalterably in his father’s past, Athos may never leave Tara, never enter a life of his own. If so, yet another spiderweb enrobes this one: Bertolucci’s. There, it is Italy, not just Athos, that suffers this Oedipal irresolution, in the nation’s case, vis-à-vis Mussolini, and Mussolini’s shadow, memory and legacy, embedded as these are in a weave of deceits, self-deceits and denials—a stunted coming-to-terms by Italy with its Fascist past.

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THE TRAGEDY OF A RIDICULOUS MAN (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1981)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Ugo Tognazzi (best actor, Cannes; Italian critics) is ferocious and sharp as sixtyish Primo Spaggiari, who has pulled himself up from working-class roots to own a cheese factory in Parma. His birthday occasions the brandishing of defenses against time, including his first-time purchase of a yacht. His twentysomething son, Giovanni (Ricky Tognazzi—like his father, an actor-director), while chiding Primo’s gift to himself as “pompous” in a charming, affectionate note, has added to it: a flare gun; a yachtsman’s cap that proves a perfect fit; a pair of binoculars. With the last, Primo espies Giovanni’s kidnapping below. Through notes presumably written by Giovanni, a billion lira-ransom is indicated.
     Writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci’s astounding La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo splits Primo’s voice amongst voiceover, private speech aloud, and conversational intercourse, early on enrobing Primo’s face and form in darkness, conveying how lost Primo feels with his son absent and in such danger, and also suggesting Primo’s interiority as a source for what is happening. Œdipus’s ordeal, after all, proceeded from his biological father’s fear of Œdipus, and a patriarchal nation such as Italy lends especial clarity to history’s replacement of fathers with sons. The police suspect that Giovanni has arranged his own kidnapping to fund Leftist causes, while Primo, suspecting that his son is dead, connives to use the ransom, part of which his wife Barbara has raised, to revive his faltering factory. Barbara, however, cannot give up her son’s ghost.
     Presumably realistic images appear fully surreal—for instance, the factory’s tunnel stacked with gold bars; at the same time, the weave of conversations and Primo’s self-conversations tangles us in delightful confusions as to what is happening, and when.
     Like Primo, Bertolucci leaves us to “solve” the film’s central “enigma” for ourselves.

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PARTNER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1968)

Combining Marx and Freud, as was his wont in his early days, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci, along with co-scenarist Gianni Amico, used Dostoievski’s 1846, pre-imprisonment novella The Double: A Petersburg Poem, which they moved to Italy and updated to the pro-Vietcong student-protest present, as a springboard for Il sosia, a dark, often opaque and arty, although witty and intriguing film about a young avant-garde theater teacher, Giacobbe, who longs to muster the will and boldness to pursue his Clara and bring his revolutionary promptings to the world of political reality. Enter his doppelgänger, on one level to spark this will, but on another level, vis-à-vis him, dramatizing his ambivalence, paralysis. Note what isn’t the first word of this paragraph: Blending. Perhaps Bertolucci, then in his mid-twenties, felt (if only now and then) that he had to choose between Marx and Freud, politics and psychoanalysis. While it is true that he was en route to his most political film, The Conformist (1970) is set in the Fascist era and, postwar, right after, and Bertolucci himself was headed for the first time to his psychoanalyst’s couch.
     Everyone agrees that the film is under the influence of Godard (one critic claims that Bertolucci is exorcising this influence; considering The Conformist, one must say the exorcism failed); but whereas Godard conceives of films in non-narrative terms, Bertolucci conceives of his in narrative terms but then goes and jerks up, obscuring, the storyline. Over time, he became more and more conventional and (presumably) himself.
     Giacobbe is funny when he boxes his own shadow or converses with himself aloud, attempting to spur his gumption; but the killer he becomes under the other Giacobbe’s tutelage is a bummer, however dazzling Pierre Clémenti’s double performance the year after his half-performance in Buñuel’s Belle de jour.

THE GRIM REAPER (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962)

At his invitation, Bernardo Bertolucci completed Pier Paolo Pasolini’s script (along with Sergio Citti) and directed the result—beautifully. La commare secca thus became the 21-year-old poet’s auspicious film debut.
     An immense bridge, glimpsed from below, cuts diagonally through the frame; what resembles a burst of birds turns out to be a flurry of notepad pages descending from some unseen hand on the bridge. Driven by breeze, they find the corpse of a middle-aged prostitute in a Roman park. The idea of fate relates to the poverty that has driven her to this risky way of earning money, although, we learn, many times the johns she had picked up were themselves too poor to pay her.
     The film is structured as a series of interrogations by the police of five suspects. Something that happens along the way is that we see the situation in the park on the fateful, fatal night from different perspectives, giving the film a Rashômon-like quality; moreover, inserts of the victim in her home preparing for the night’s streetwalking accompany each of the suspects’ accounts. Sometimes what we see as flashbacks do not match what we hear the person tell the police; for instance, the first suspect, instead of spending the day looking for work, as he tells the police, meets up with two pals in order to find a stranger to rob in the park.
     The objectivity of the police interrogations combines with the subjectivity—in some cases, lyricism—of the flashbacks as Bertolucci surveys a brace of struggling and predatory Roman lives.
     Characters pass into and out of deep shadows and disquieting silence. The most sympathetic character is the victim herself; the least sympathetic, the one who, when arrested, explains: “I didn’t do anything! She was a whore!”

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BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964)

“Those who didn’t live in the eighteenth century before the [French] Revolution will never be able to know the sweetness of life.” — Talleyrand

At 22 Bernardo Bertolucci made Prima della rivoluzione. Fabrizio, his young protagonist, concludes there’s no escaping his bourgeois past, no matter his Leftist political leanings. The oppressed whom he would help liberate aspire to be members of the middle class! Meanwhile, he has an affair with Aunt Gina, whom as a little boy he enjoyed watching dress. “I always laugh, I always cry,” says this encapsulation of Mother Church. She breaks down after being taunted by a child—I presume a Puckish image of herself—obliviously singing up in a tree. “You are happy,” she says aloud as Fabrizio (whom we glimpse through a window) dances in the street. “But it won’t last . . . you’ll forget me. You’ll hate me.” At Fabrizio’s wedding send-off, Gina (Adriana Asti, terrific) is tearfully showering with kisses a younger nephew.
     Inspired by Godard and Resnais’s Marienbad (1961), Bertolucci tries everything: zooms; a moving car camera, attached either to the front or the side; dissolves within a scene—if you will, “soft” jump-cuts; hard jump-cuts; misty lyrical poetry by a lake. This movie is in love with movies and movie-making.
     It is also one of the most important films for understanding the sixties. Its lovely incest (seven years before Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart) reaches for a synthesis derived from thesis (family, structure, order) and antithesis (the pleasure of doing one’s own thing). In the States we knew on the basis of this reconciliation that revolution would never happen here.
     Or, perhaps, anywhere else in the postwar West. A schoolteacher tells Fabrizio, “[Y]ou can argue only with people who have the same ideas.”
     Devastating; irreplaceable; phenomenal.

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