Bertolucci relied more on improvisation and real-life inspiration from the ongoing student protests than his screenplay—on paper, an adaptation of The Double by Dostoyevsky. Giacobbe (Pierre Clementi), a middle-class student and occasional theatre teacher who surrounds himself with mountains of books, finds enlightenment in the form of a doppelgänger: a more charismatic Giacobbe (Clementi again), unimpeded by bourgeois respectability and thus uninhibited in his ideas about theatre's capacity to blow up the hypocrisies of everyday life. The two enlist a group of students for a series of happenings that recall the motifs of Jean-Luc Godard's sixties period: logo-flashing, giddy graffitiing, direct addresses, obvious quotations. But the timing of this homage—slightly after May 1968—suggests more ambivalence than reverence, foreshadowing the patricidal gesture against Godard to come in The Conformist, with which Bertolucci also took a hard line against the "destruction of structure" so precisely expressed in Partner. – Kelley Dong