Jean-Claude Biette left France at 23 without a word to his family so as to escape military service … The Algerian war was over when he went absent without leave in autumn 1965, but the period of compulsory national service was still 16 months … This key episode in Biette’s life is essentially the subject matter of La partenza. The young man’s “departing”, as told to a friend, takes place in a specific location: Parma and the surrounding area … The young man is played by Giuseppe Bertolucci, whose father was the poet and organiser of Parma’s film club, Attilio Bertolucci, a friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini; Biette had become Pasolini’s occasional French teacher, assistant and the subtitler of some of his films … Here, the colonial “peace-making mission” in Algeria … becomes Bourguiba’s socialist Tunisia, where a young teacher at odds with authority wants to go to teach children. La partenza is one of the four Italian shorts by Jean-Claude Biette … It is part of a trilogy of portraits, all filmed in 1968: Attilio Bertolucci and Sandro Penna are the portraits of two great Italian poets. Accordingly, La partenza, is a portrait of the former’s son and the hidden portrayal (under the phenomenology of an escape) of a high-minded prodigal son as well as a poet of life.

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin