Word: spidered
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...will be around before then. The Conformist, which had its fair share of attention when it came out in 1971, will soon be showing at two local theaters. And now Before the Revolution, the film which won Bertolucci international renown at 23, returns to the Square together with The Spider's Strategem, a film made in 1969 for Italian television but released in the United States only this year...
Less political, more lyrical than his later work, less self-conscious, and more romantic, The Spider's Strategem is a film of a kind Bertolucci is unlikely to make again. Structured around Jorge Luis Borges's little story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," it is a film of limited ambitions shot with remarkable sensitivity and control. Its limit is a lack which might not be noticed except in comparison with the political and psychological ponderings of Bertolucci's other films, a moral core which is absent because of the source chosen. Borges's stories are self-admitted...
...reigning Agnellis are as dissimilar in style as an 850 Sport Spider and a 128 family sedan. The 51-year-old Gianni, jet-setting celebrity and voluble charmer, is characteristically energetic and impatient. By contrast, Umberto so detests partygoing that friends say his marriage to Antonella Piaggio, whose family makes Vespa motor scooters, broke up three years ago partly because of her active social life. To relax, Umberto spends weekends sailing off the Sardinian coast, where he keeps a home, often with Girl Friend Allegra Caracciolo di Castagneto, a first cousin of Gianni's wife...
...shot is a moral statement." By such a playful standard, Bertolucci would be Pascal. No one since the late Max Ophuls (Lola Monies) has moved the camera quite so exuberantly, and with such easy, fluid symmetry. Such a luxurious style can sometimes weigh heavily on the material; in The Spider's Stratagem it complements the material, indeed reinforces it. Tara, its name recalling Gone With the Wind and conjuring up phantoms of romantic fiction, is turned into a single huge stage set on which the plot to conceal the treachery is daily re-enacted like an eternal pageant. Bertolucci...
...Spider's Stratagem also contains what has become by now a hallmark of every Bertolucci film, a scene of dancing done with a certain intense but stately vigor. Here, the elder Magnani takes a partner and leads her proudly and gracefully round the dance pavilion, demonstrating his contempt for the astonished Blackshirts standing on the sidelines. It is a lovely, graceful scene, and suggests another title for the film, First Polka in Tara. Not as apt, perhaps, but probably more commercial. - Jay Cocks