Labyrinths

By JAY COCKS

THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM

Directed by BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI Screenplay by BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, EDOARDO DE GREGORI and MARILU PAVOLINI

Made in 1969 for Italian television, this mesmeric film is only now being released in America, in the wake of the wide acclaim for Bertolucci's The Conformist and in anticipation of the brouhaha over Last Tango in Paris (TIME cover, Jan. 22). Perhaps Tango may not SO much sweep up The Spider's Stratagem in its wake as swamp it. The Spider's Stratagem boasts no superstars in the cast, no odor of brimstone and no heavy hype. It should not need them. Less exotic than The Conformist or Tango, certainly more subtle and contained. The Spider's Strata gem is Bertolucci's best movie.

Like such otherwise di verse works as Godard's Contempt and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, The Spider's Stratagem concerns the workings of myth, the complicity of fancy and legend in history. The screenplay is an extrapolation from a short fiction by Jorge Borges, Theme of the Traitor and Hero, in which a historical researcher, investigating the death of his great-grandfather, a political martyr, discovers that the man actually traduced his confederates.

He collaborated in arranging his own murder at the hands of his allies, choosing "circumstances deliberately dramatic, which would engrave themselves upon the popular imagination and which would speed the revolt."

Details of the death scenario were drawn from literature.

In Borges, the researcher becomes an accomplice to the fiction; in the Bertolucci adaptation, he becomes a vic tim of it. Borges' "oppressed and stubborn country" becomes Tara, a fictional village in the Po Valley, a place of old men and tenacious memories. The great-grandfather becomes a father.

The researcher, Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi), is summoned to Tara by his slain father's mistress (Alida Valli). A statue of the senior Magnani, resting upon a pedestal bearing the legend "vilely murdered by Fascist bullets," stands in the town square, surveying all who pass with unformed, unchiseled eyes.

When Athos finally learns the truth about his father's treachery, he learns, too, that it is irrelevant. History, in a trim irony, becomes the distortion. The myth becomes the vital, seductive reality. Inextricably ensnared in it, Athos cannot leave the town. At the station, successive announcements are made that the Parma train is late. Its arrival will probably be postponed infinitely. Athos kneels to look at the tracks. They are overgrown with weeds.

Bertolucci, like Borges, deliberately omits any explanation for the hero's initial treachery. Author and director both are interested not so much in the act itself as in its effects. The measures taken to mask the incident become a paradigm of the process of myth. Bertolucci suggests the perpetual, inexorable influence of the past by the ingenious expedient of having the characters-the mistress, the father's comrades-look in flashback as they do in the present: the same age, the same aspect, even, at times, a suggestion of the same costume. It gives a disquieting, eerie sensation, like staring into a mirror and seeing everything save yourself decades younger.

In his phenomenal Before the Revolution, made in 1963 when he was 22, Bertolucci included a funny, affectionate cafe conversation during which a film intellectual says flatly that "the dolly 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's ornate camera movements, along with the superbly lush lighting of Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, stress the theatricality and artifice of the concept, making Tara a kind of sun-drenched cloister hewed out of time.

The 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

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