Devastated by an unrequited love, unassuming drama teacher Giacobbe considers suicide but instead embraces his alter ego, a wild revolutionary. As their roles are gradually reversed—the entire world of the film plays with notions of duality and reproduction—Jacob (Pierre Clémenti, in a bravura double performance) indulges his anarchic and creative doppelganger. Bertolucci’s exuberant jeu d’esprit is also an engaging experimental investigation into the nature of cinema, performance, and the artist, and uses Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double as a springboard for what the director himself has called “my most surreal film.”