Pluskylang Great Film overall

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

runamokprods While the often noticed aping by Bertolucci of his hero Godard in this early film is quite true (even the film itself admits its debt to Godard right on screen), there is more here than mere imitation. Whether intentional or not I saw plenty of other influences from Bunuel, to the paintings if Rene Magritte. A loose, examination of schizophrenia; an inhibited intellectual young man spawns a separate self who is confident, aggressive and revolutionary. While vaguely based on Dostoyevsky's "The Double", this is very much it's own story, and a hell of a lot of fun. I found Bertolucci's surreal playfulness more inviting than most of Godard's work from that period. It asks many of the same questions, and has much of the same distain for modern consumer society, (and film narrative conventions) but does it with an absurdist sense of humor that give rise to some moments that now seem as much "Monty Python" as they are French New Wave. The most egregious Godard rip-offs can be annoying (sudden inappropriate music, etc), but they are for the most part mercifully brief. Mostly this is more influence and homage than theft, and creates a time capsule that still has relevance and interest, and pleasure in the watching. Pierre Clementi does a fine job playing the two different versions of the hero Giaccobe.

Joseph Sylvers I was at Amoeba Music(A Hollywood Record Shop) the other day with my roommate and I had found this in the used section and it seemed interesting. I had never heard of it before and I didn't have the cash to buy it, but my roommate did, and bought it instead. I think this was one of the best films I've ever seen. The story is apparently an adaptation of a Dostoevsky story called "The Double",(which I've never read), the film is about a young Theater professor in the sixties, who begins losing his mind, and seeing an identical version of himself who begins giving him orders, egging him on to commit acts of terrorism, murder, and just generally insane things. It precedes Fight Club by thirty years. A remarkable film, from a great director in his own right, before Last Tango In Paris, there was Partner. A funny, smart, riot of a film, that creates tension and absurd explosion with the same grace, conjoined like deformed twins at the hip.

valadas Yes we know that many people think that life is absurd and meaningless and society is hopeless. Fortunately many more still think that life has a meaning and society can be reformed and changed. This movie also intends to pass another message which is that life is not real and only the theatre is real. Well the great German poet, Novalis, once said that poetry is the absolute real but that had quite another sense perhaps. Anyway what we watch here is a succession of scenes and dialogues void of any meaning at all and of any plot that can be followed. Bertolucci is a great film director but I think that this movie doesn't honour him at all.

Jon Hopwood This rather ludicrous exchange takes place at the end of David Lean's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's epic novel DR. ZHIVAGO:Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: Tonya, can you play the balalaika?Tonya's Boyfriend: Can she play? She's an artist!This dialogue, as well as the scene within the framing device of Yuri Zhivago's brother Yevgraf finding Yuri's love child with Lara and telling her about her "past," appears nowhere in the novel. Instead, in an epilogue in the novel, two of the many characters, after the end of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), talk about how one had met this love child at the front. Their ruminations illustrate the great dislocations caused by the Revolution, Stalin's Terror, and the War. Nowhere does something as silly and trivial as the question "Can you play the balalaika?" appear in the novel.Movies that use great events as backdrops to personal stories tend to trivialize the great events and make the intimate lives of their characters rather absurd and trivial (ironically, the very charge Strelnikov makes to Zhivago, in reference to his poetry, in Lean's movie). Great events such as revolutions wash over everyone and have to be handled with the greatest care to avoid this fundamental absurdity of the events being greater than the individuals.Before "The Dreamers," Bertolucci already made his film that ruminates on the events of '68 and its aftermath in the year itself:"Partner" ("Il Sosia"), based on Dostoyevsky's "The Double." It is very interesting, and very honest, look at the spirit of the times and I highly recommend it.