Partner

Year: 1968

Runtime: 105 mins

Language: Italian

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Drama

Revolution… Sex… Profit… Forbidden… Banned… The story of a young man who meets his own likeness and uses him to fulfill his dreams.

Direct adaptation

The Double and The Gambler: The book behind Partner

Two Novellas of a Clerk Displaced by His Perfect Social Rival and a Tutor Who Stakes Love, Pride, and His Future on the Roulette Wheel · by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky

Why this book?

Bernardo Bertolucci uses Dostoevsky's The Double as the declared basis for Giacobbe, a young theater teacher confronted by an identical figure who is more aggressive, politically active, sexually confident, and capable of occupying his life. The film transfers the bureaucratic humiliation of Golyadkin to late-1960s Rome and layers it with student radicalism, performance, Brecht, and deliberate formal disruption. The novella preserves the original Petersburg office world and feverish interior repetition, clarifying how much Bertolucci adapts the divided identity while reinventing its social meaning.

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