Partner (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1968)

[titanium]

Partner

Bernardo Bertolucci

Just a short note guys to tell you that the BFI release includes the French soundtrack. That's a great news so far because it was the direct sound of the shooting. I've seen both version (the old NTSC tape was the french soundtrack), both French and American DVDs only includes the Italian dub. Actually, you will hear Clementi talk with his own voice while the Italian actors speak Italian. The mix of both languages add very much to the avant-garde of it.

Too bad for the great extras of the NoShame release, but that true soundtrack is the most important to me.

Hope the BFI transfer will be topnotch !

[stereo]

Yet another delay in the BFI edition of Bertolucci's PARTNER. This film is an unseen masterpiece, previously released in R1 by NoShame in a disastrous edition (as previous post mentions, it has the Italian dubbed track, which ruins Pierre Clementi's performance). The NoShame had great extras, but for this film in particular, the sound is everything. It was Bertolucci's first use of direct sound, and I seem to recall Bertolucci himself saying that it was the first direct-sound film produced in Italy (can anyone confirm?). The upcoming BFI disc apparently has the original, "international" soundtrack, but it's been delayed two or three times now.

For those who don't know the film (which is just about everybody), it's a deeply ambivalent work, almost plotless, about a theater professor (Clementi) who decides to...... well, it's hard to say what he decides to do, but it has to do with making theater out of revolution, or revolution out of theater, or something. Bertolucci himself more or less disowns the film -- he has said on several occasions that he was mentally unstable when he made it, and it shows. He takes the lessons of Godard (and particularly of DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES and MADE IN USA, which came out right before Bertolucci began work on the film) farther than any other director ever has, almost to the point that the film just evaporates. Clementi's (dual) performance is a showstopper, a real tour de force of madness and rage, and the film has a terrific Morricone score and 'scope camerawork by Ugo Piccone. It was never released in the States, except for a single screening at the New York Film Festival. Afterwards, Bertolucci went on to the glories of THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM and THE CONFORMIST, films he probably couldn't have made if he hadn't gone through the ordeal of PARTNER first.

Anyone else have anything to say about this "lost" masterpiece?

[Awesome Welles]

I am very keen to see this not really knowing anything about the film. Bertoulucci must have really turned his back on Godard as his idol after this film, especially as the address of the professor to be assassinated in The Conformist was that of Godard - read into that what you will!

[tartarlamb]

Anyone else have anything to say about this "lost" masterpiece?

Its been awhile since I've seen it, but I don't remember it being quite a masterpiece, at least in my estimation. I remember thinking that this, and his segment in Love and Anger, were sort of negligible remnants of a nonstarter phase, engaging in a sort of radical cinema that I don't think suits Bertolucci very well (in fact, suits few filmmakers, or people in general, very well). I didn't hate it, but bookended by films like Before the Revolution and Spider's Stratagem -- films with a very confident voice -- it seemed not bad, but pretty forgettable. I'm not a huge fan of Clementi, either, which is probably a big art house no-no.

At the same time, I'm sure there's an audience for Partner. For those whom this sort of cinema appeals to, it could very well be considered great.

[domino harvey]

I've seen plenty of films inspired in some degree by the director's love of Godard (and even enjoyed some of the more transparently inauthentic-- surely I'm one of the few people out there who'd place Die Niklashauser Fart in the top tier of Fassbinder's work, but perhaps that says more about how much I value his more organic works! I also appreciated the rather endearing 8 Chemin du Tracas, in which the director somehow convinced an entire high school class to participate in his homage to late period Godard), but until Partner I don't think I've ever seen such a blatant and braindead attempt to co-opt everything Godard does stylistically without understanding that like a seventh grader thinking they're a genius for imitating William Carlos William, it's already been done better and with meaning by the object of adoration. I got so much second-hand embarrassment from each successive, empty Godard emulation here that by the time Tina Aumont shows up hoisting around giant branded laundry containers I was truly flabbergasted that this wasn't laughed out of every theatre it played in. Surely audiences then would see this is about as authentic a product as the Living Wake and all those other fake-Wes Anderson indies were fifteen years ago, right? I think it also betrays that Bertolucci's insight into whatever he thought Godard was doing didn't run very deep-- I originally believed the shallow discussion in Prima della rivoluzione about Godard was deliberately indicative of the characters' surface level insights into the complex art films they were digesting, but now I'm not so sure!

[Mr Sausage]

I have own my suspicions about Bertolucci as an intellectual. I think of The Conformist, where his example of revelatory philosophical dialogue is a high school rendition of Plato's cave allegory. The man had a lot of talents, but I'm not sure abstract thought was one of them.