Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1964, 112 mins, in Italian with English subtitles
Cast: Francesco Barilli, Adriana Asti, Allen Midgette, Morando Morandini
Review by Eva Moravetz
It is astonishing that Before The Revolution is only Bertolucci’s second film, which he made at the tender age of twenty-three. This movie not only established him straight away as a new auteur of Italian cinema in the 1960s but it is still considered by many as one of his finest films. No minor achievement for an up-and-coming twenty-something.
The story follows Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), a brooding and sensitive bourgeois youth who, while enjoying his comfortable upper-class life, flirts with Marxist ideas. He breaks up with his patrician fiancée, Clelia (Cristina Pariset) to join the Communists. However his attempt is only half-hearted – he takes no take action but merely daydreams about a revolution, which he believes is about to happen and end all privileges including his own. After his best friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) commits suicide, he finds consolation in the arms of Gina (Adriana Asti), his chic and independent aunt from Milan. Thus Fabrizio is torn between his incestuous relationship, his revolutionary ideas and the pull of his own background, urging him to conform to the traditional bourgeois life model of marriage and comfort.
Before The Revolution is not a political film – it does not send us political messages à la Jean-Luc Godard (although the French New Wave influenced Bertolucci to a great extent). It is a study of Fabrizio’s soul and a mirror held up against a social class to which Bertolucci himself belonged. The film’s storyline is loosely based on Stendhal’s 1838 novel The Charterhouse Of Parma, but being set in Parma, Bertolucci’s birthplace and concerning a young man just like himself at the time, it is obviously autobiographical. Perhaps Bertolucci’s own way of turning into a revolutionary was to become a great filmmaker, a pioneer of Italian New Wave.
Francesco Barilli as Fabrizio delivers a subtle performance with suppressed emotional intensity and Adriana Asti as Gina is dazzling as his moody and girlish older lover. Although Fabrizio is our tortured protagonist, far the most intriguing character is Aunt Gina. She is clearly an outcast particularly in provincial Parma, where men look her pretty figure up and down in the piazza or try to get her phone number while she is buying newspapers. She is playful but emotionally volatile. She loves her independence but hates to be alone; “the only cure for my pain is other people” she says. Fabrizio’s love for Gina and their passionate affair is like a bubble, an escape from the norm. He is constantly occupied with ideas – he even visits a Communist march – but strangely remains an outside onlooker.
Love, politics, mystery and poetry are elements in all Bertolucci films; they make up the essence of his auteurship. The film is peppered with poetic monologues and wonderfully shot sequences in the streets of Parma or in the countryside. One especially stunning setting is a lush and dense grove along the river Po.
Before The Revolution is not one of Berolucci’s most often cited films but it did win the Young Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film Festival on its first release in 1964 and it remains a gem of 1960s New Wave, an exquisite psychological portrait of a character of an era.
love to know what you think of some of my work and music videos 
