Word: strategems
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...Spider Strategem 7:50; weekend...
...Spider's Strategem 7:50 (weekend...
...around before then. The Conformist, which had its fair share of attention when it came out in 1971, will soon be showing at two local theaters. And now Before the Revolution, the film which won Bertolucci international renown at 23, returns to the Square together with The Spider's Strategem, a film made in 1969 for Italian television but released in the United States only this year...
Less political, more lyrical than his later work, less self-conscious, and more romantic, The Spider's Strategem is a film of a kind Bertolucci is unlikely to make again. Structured around Jorge Luis Borges's little story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," it is a film of limited ambitions shot with remarkable sensitivity and control. Its limit is a lack which might not be noticed except in comparison with the political and psychological ponderings of Bertolucci's other films, a moral core which is absent because of the source chosen. Borges's stories are self-admitted...
...village is cut off from the rest of the world, the tracks leading out overgrown with grass. It enters into no real moral grapplings; even its politics are just subordinate to tricks in the plot. More didactic concerns are left to Bertolucci's other films. What The Spider's Strategem demonstrates above all is his stunning technical finesse...