The Spider's Stratagem, dedicated to the Emilia-Romagna region and inspired by Borges, is financed by Rai, presented at the Venice Film Festival and successfully distributed in arthouse circuits. Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) goes to the Po Valley town of Tara (Sabbioneta) to learn more about his father, a well-known anti-fascist hero, but at the end of the investigation, despite having discovered that the hero was actually a traitor, he remains a prisoner of the place outside of time. This is the synthesis of a brilliant film, where Tara - explains the author - "represents the renunciation of Parma" and "the need to condemn the paternal culture". Tara is also the vast O'Hara estate in Gone With The Wind and the home of the mythical kings of Ireland. We are only on the periphery of the work of a spider who is the director himself, busy ensnaring us in a tangle of cultural and private citations/suggestions, a magma suggested by the vivid bestiary that accompanies the opening credits: tigers, dogs, horses hunted by wolves, bristly wild boars and then zebras, reddish roosters, reptiles, in short the surreal genius of the painter Antonio Ligabue. Father and son have the same name (as in Shakespeare's Hamlet) and are physically identical: the mission of Athos's double is to reach the center of the labyrinth and penetrate the dark forest, whether it be called the unconscious, History or legend. And it is worth transcribing here a reflection of the author: «The myth is important but I try not to get caught up in mythologies, and when I make a film I am always cautious in tackling this subject. However, there is a phrase by Cocteau that I particularly appreciate: ‘Between myth and History, I prefer myth because in History one starts from truth to arrive at lies, while in myth one starts from lies to arrive at truth.’” Strengthened by this opinion, the young explorer slides to the base of the mythological ridge to find the structural dichotomies of Before the Revolution and Partner – bourgeois and Marxist, materialist and dreamer, poet and subversive – but always the same as Oedipus, that is, a traveler who has arrived at the crossroads where he will meet destiny.
