The Spider's Stratagem

The Spider's Stratagem (1970)

Genres - Drama  |   Sub-Genres - Psychological Drama  |   Run Time - 97 min.  |   Countries - Italy  |   MPAA Rating - NR
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Synopsis by Hal Erickson

Originally produced for Italian television, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem (La Strategia del Ragno) can be regarded as a cinematic tone poem. Adapted from a Jorge Luis Borges short story, the film stars Giulio Brogi as a young Italian who returns to his ancestral home -- the place where his anti-fascist father was assassinated, a long-ago incident that still disturbs the populace. Cold-shouldered by everyone in town, the young man tries to find out why everyone is so hostile towards him; after all, was not his father a hero of the people? In some (but not all) ways, The Spider's Stratagem is a precursor to Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, delineating the correlation between sex and political ideology.

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Keywords

Italian [nationality], son, death-in-family, investigation, father, resistance-fighters, town