Visually, the film was beautiful; Bertolucci seems to have paved the way for the films now in terms of shots and angles. The shot when Athos gets punched for no particular reason, showing just the fist and sound of a punch rather than filming the whole action. It felt a bit familiar, probably because others have been inspired by Bertolucci's genius. Also, towards the end while Athos is in the theater piecing the final clues in the quest for his father's murderer: it felt like a sort of a visual mind trick in how you see Athos on one side and his father's friends off in the distance in the box across the theater and as Athos is verbally piecing the clues together a friend disappears one by one until they all end up in the same box where his father was killed and the confession is revealed. When Draifa is speaking in the present but is placed in a flashback is something I also found incredibly clever. The music, I felt, was very effective in the film, particularly when Athos is taken to the Po River and begins to run out of fear of being harmed by his father's friends.
As Bertolucci states in his interview, he was inspired by the story and maintained most of its "mechanism." Changing some details, among them being the setting and characters, Bertolucci took Borges's story and made it his, applying it to his own experiences at the time; according to him, the film wouldn't have been possible without Bertolucci's experience undergoing psychoanalysis prior to writing the script. As a result, I figure this is a very personal work of art; without this prior knowledge, of both the Borges story or Bertolucci's interview, I don't know if I would have enjoyed it as much. They both gave me a deeper insight into the film's message which helped me appreciate it that much more.
