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prologue to the film's narration. The protagonist - Giacobbe - is a docile and frustrated man
living in a claustrophobic flat, whose only company is his servant Petruschka (the same name
as his counterpart in Dostoevsky's novel arguably facilitates the viewer's recollection of the
story's Russian origins). Giacobbe, a drama teacher in Rome, suffers continuous
humiliations, especially regarding his love for the shallow Clara, since her family considers
him inadequate because of his lower social class. His vengeful intentions remain at a useless
declamatory level until the mysterious appearance of his double. Here the analogies with
Dostoevsky's novel end, because while in the book the double is depicted contemptuously
because he adheres to the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, in the film he organizes violent
responses to Giacobbe w s private and social situations. As the film unfolds, the double kills
Clara and an attractive saleswoman; the drama students first embrace but eventually
withdraw from the double's revolutionary project. After this failure, Giacobbe and the double
disappear to continue their existentialist conversations.
Using avant-garde theatre to create intense and saturated modal qualities
The sequence which begins the narrative of Partner shows Giacobbe reading aloud, in a
declamatory style, from Artaud's Le theatre et son double. This quotation and its delivery
signal Bertolucci's intention to translate into cinematic form the European quest to give the
performing arts a pedagogical role in society. A link between Partner and Artaud's work was
recognized by critics, who traced Bertolucci's first articulation of the French dramatist's
theories to the short film Agonia, which he shot in 1967 for the collective film Vangelo 70,
and which was distributed in 1969 under the title Amore e Rabbia (Socci 1996: 34). The short
is constructed around a long take showing people at the bedside of a dying cardinal. The
performance is highly gestural; figures emerge from the floor or from elsewhere in the room,
try to seize the cardinal, and then fall back again. Movement and words (never in form of
dialogues) evoke memories and thoughts from the cardinal's guilty conscience. Bertolucci
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