On demand: "The Spider's Stratagem"

The Spider's Stratagem is one to stick on should you wish to appreciate anew just what a rich, complex melting pot the culture had arrived at by 1970. This was Bernardo Bertolucci, in the very same year he'd released The Conformist to great acclaim, dashing off an illustration of (or variation on) the Jorge Luis Borges short story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero; yet the film opens with a man getting off a train in a small town that reminds you its maker had taken a story credit on Once Upon a Time in the West only two years before, and it heads towards confronting the legacies of Italian fascism and World War II. Something was unmistakably in the air, under foot and in the walls and woods, and Bertolucci responded by finding the architecture he was filming every bit as compelling as the people who passed before it. (Two further influences reveal themselves: Antonioni and de Chirico.) The stranger in town is the resonantly named Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi, a performer with something of the Bryan Ferrys about him), headed this way to learn more about the death of a father with whom he shares a name, age and physical resemblance, a left-wing hero reportedly murdered by fascists in the late 1930s. Except: our boy walks into a series of surreal encounters that indicate that thumbnail biographical sketch is - like much else around these parts, from the direction of a hotel to the sex of a rabbit and the continuity from shot to shot - not nearly as clearcut as he and we'd first assumed.

Where The Conformist, Bertolucci's masterpiece, formed a taut, psychologically penetrating study of a murderously confused protagonist, Spider proves a looser proposition, something akin to light relief: a puzzle-movie designed to bamboozle the viewer, being both blackly comic and cast in the brightest sunlight. Bertolucci regionalises Borges, writing scenes that might superficially appear familiar from a century of Italian cinema: mealtimes, dances, even a dash of opera. (The plot - in both senses of the word - hinges on an attempt to assassinate the visiting Il Duce during a performance of Rigoletto.) Yet everything is rendered unfamiliar and disconcerting by virtue of eccentric framing, blocking and cutting; the unresolved tensions our hero has come here to investigate are absorbed into the film's very form. Having been set to find the frames that best approximated darkening states of mind in the earlier film, genius DoP Vittorio Storaro here delights in capturing funny juxtapositions, sight gags and trompe-l'oeil effects, and lining up travelling shots that suggest something getting away from us or passing us by; these, finally, carry everybody off into the long grass. Editor Roberto Perpignani is set to stitching together the least congruous images and sounds, the impish hand of late Sixties Godard hovering over some mix-and-match music cues, pulled out from beneath the viewer as one might a rug. It's one of the babblier Bertoluccis, staffed by grizzled old buggers whose talk goes round and round and round, such that it might also start to drive you doolally; but it's intentionally babbly, and somehow still hangs together as an effective murder-mystery with real, lucid things to say about the madness inscribed into the landscape, the dormant threat of extremism, and the way history, like a long-running argument, begins to repeat itself. Still a tricky, slippery watch, but never less than fascinating, and quietly brilliant in how it came to anticipate a lot of (not just) Italian politics to come.

The Spider's Stratagem is currently streaming via rarefilmm.com.