Inspired by a youthful novel by Dostoevsky, Partner today appears much less Godardian and provocative than it might have seemed to viewers in 1968. From some of the author’s statements, one can deduce that the film is not among the most beloved, yet it is an interesting and problematic work that offers unexpected glimpses and is certainly not forgotten. Bertolucci says he saw Partner again on television a few years ago and found in it “the suffering of someone who has not yet understood well, or of someone who is at a crossroads without knowing which direction to go”. To play the double role – of a teacher at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and of his mischievous and subversive alter ego – the director turned to Pierre Clémenti, fresh from the notable success of Buñuel’s Belle de jour. Physically, the actor is a balanced combination of the characteristics of Francesco Barilli and Allen Midgette, that is, Fabrizio and Agostino. He then has that hallucinated hidalgo look useful to the character of Jacob, who in the Old Testament stole his birthright with a plate of lentils. We could therefore say that the two distinct halves of Before the Revolution remained so even after the revolution and that the furious Jacob makes Molotov cocktails with the sole purpose of appropriating his father's inheritance: something that Fabrizio did simply by returning to the bourgeois family fold. In Partner the introverted intellectual, the sacrificial lamb, feeling cheated by fate, duplicates himself into a rebel, finds his wolf skin again and howls and attacks and bites and would like to slaughter the most conspicuous sheep of the flock. The autobiography is linked to the reflection on 1968 through an extremely suggestive package. The sharp technicolor backgrounds – red, black, white, deep blue – recall the use of color in avant-garde theater sets and, in addition to an explicit reference to the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, introduce the chromaticism and forms of Francis Bacon into Bertolucci’s stylistic field. Doesn’t that apartment in which a Calderónian (and Pasolinian) Sigismondo screams out all his rage and impotence, immersed in the solid tyranny of the décor, made of author’s canvases and towers of books, perhaps resemble one of the rooms or monads or psychic prisons painted by Bacon, where the individual writhes in solitude, moans and is not heard, suffers atrociously without any hope of redemption?
