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Plot

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.
MPAA Rating:
Genre(s):
Drama
Run Time:
97min.
Director(s):
Themes:
Haunted By the Past
Tone:
Atmospheric,Deliberate,Meditative
Keywords:
Italian [nationality],death-in-family,father,investigation,resistance-fighters,son,town
Country of Origin:
Italy (10-04-1972)