Originally made for Italian television but released theatrically, The Spider’s Stratagem, Bernardo Bertolucci’s follow-up to his dazzling The Conformist is no less ambitious, for all its humble origins. Adapting Jorge Luis Borges’ Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, Bertolucci transposes the setting from Ireland to Italy, making his protagonist the son of a martyred anti-fascist leader rather than the great-grandson of a martyred Irish republican. As its title would suggest, Borges’ original story – brief but bursting with ideas – examines the nature of heroism and treachery, presenting the case of a man who might be considered both hero and traitor at one and the same time and revealing why, once having discovered the identity of the assassin, a blood relation might be compelled of his own free will to hold his silence. Minor themes include history’s propensity for repeating itself and the phenomenon of art influencing real-life events.

Miraculously, not only does all of this survive translation to the screen intact, Bertolucci further enriches the story by blurring the identities of his lead character and the father whose death he is investigating. Besides utilising clever editing, giving the two men the same name (Athos Magnani), emphasising their physical similarity and having a single actor play both parts, the director achieves this effect most brilliantly with the introduction of Alida Valli’s character, Draifa, the murdered man’s former mistress; mentally unbalanced, forever trapped in 1936, the year of her lover’s death, she is unable to separate the past from the present, the father from the son. So successful is Bertolucci in creating this disorientating, dreamlike texture, by the time the film draws to its enigmatic conclusion we are beginning to question, not whether or not Magnani, Jr. is capable of ever leaving the village where Magnani, Sr. died – which, frankly, has been in doubt for some time – but whether we ever saw him arrive in the first place, whether he hasn’t always been there in one form or another.