Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

runamokprods 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.

zetes Bertolucci was heavily indebted to Godard and the other French New Wave directors in his sophomore feature, Before the Revolution. His third feature, Partner, has him follow Godard into his fin de cinema. Partner is a purely experimental film with little narrative. It's definitely a turn for the worst for Bertolucci. Thankfully he was drawn back into narrative cinema with his fourth film, The Conformist. Partner is worth seeing for fans of the director and New Wave enthusiasts. It has some interesting points. The minimal plot of the film has Pierre Clémenti playing a man with split personalities. Most of the rest of it is made up of random vignettes. Some are amusing, some are annoying. Some are just plain boring. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough amusing ones to make it an easy watch. Clémenti is excellent, and Bertolucci lives up to his reputation as one of the cinema's greatest visual minds. Stefania Sandrelli, who would go on to star in The Conformist, appears briefly with curly blonde hair. She doesn't do much, but she's gorgeous.

Joseph Sylvers I was at Amoeba Music(A Hollywood Record Shop) the other day with my roommate and I had found this in the used section and it seemed interesting. I had never heard of it before and I didn't have the cash to buy it, but my roommate did, and bought it instead. I think this was one of the best films I've ever seen. The story is apparently an adaptation of a Dostoevsky story called "The Double",(which I've never read), the film is about a young Theater professor in the sixties, who begins losing his mind, and seeing an identical version of himself who begins giving him orders, egging him on to commit acts of terrorism, murder, and just generally insane things. It precedes Fight Club by thirty years. A remarkable film, from a great director in his own right, before Last Tango In Paris, there was Partner. A funny, smart, riot of a film, that creates tension and absurd explosion with the same grace, conjoined like deformed twins at the hip.

darth-chico 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