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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Before the Revolution (1962)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Bernardo Bertolucci was only 22 when he wrote and directed his second feature, Before the Revolution. (His debut was the Pier Paolo Pasolini-scripted The Grim Reaper.) While the film’s protagonist is a young man roughly of Bertolucci’s age at the time, the film is such a lucid and insightful look at the pervasive and often stifling grip the middle class has on society that it plays like the work of a much older, more mature artist. Set in the Italian city of Parma, where the rich and poor segments of the city are bisected by a river, the film gives us a young man named Fabrizio (played with intensity by Francesco Barilli) from an upper middle class family, who is having a serious love affair with Communism. Feeling guilty about his privilege and his pretty, bourgeois girlfriend Clelia, Fabrizio finds comfort in his rote learning of Marxist doctrine and his ideological guru Ceasre (Morando Morandini). Fabrizio tries to get his parent-hating friend Agostino to join the cause, but his drowning death – an accident? – puts an unexpected spin on Fabrizio’s life. When his free-spirited aunt Gina (played by the remarkable Adriana Asti) comes to stay with Fabrizio and his parents, Fabrizio clings even harder to his communist ideology
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 Before the Revolution (1962) Starring: Adriana Asti Directed by:Bernardo Bertolucci VHS Tape - $25.95 Not Rated Subtitles in English |
Gina is everything Fabrizio is not used to in a woman – sensual and existing outside the confines of doctrine and ideology. Fabrizio wants to possess her completely, and the two soon fall into a steamy love affair in the large home of his well-to-do parents. Gina, however, is tormented by some powerful inner demons that Fabrizio can only guess at and is resistant to the ideological lure of Communism. Indeed, Gina sees before Fabrizio does that his ideology is of little practical use in its youthful enthusiasm, and the shackles of Fabrizio’s upbringing are reaching up to pull him back to the fold. When he finally finds he cannot completely control Gina and can no longer support a proletariat more concerned with entertainment than party parades, Fabrizio capitulates, acknowledging his fate to forever be a spoiled upper middle class citizen, with all its assurances of stability and normalcy. Risk, after all, is better as a youthful notion, and Fabrizio himself sees his dalliance with Communism as an ended love affair. In the film's final scenes, we find Fabrizio some time later at his wedding with Gina in attendance. Gina showers Fabrizio’s younger brother with kisses, as if indicating the cycle will repeat itself once again.
Bertolucci’s film is gorgeously written and acted – it’s Asti’s film all the way though – and it paves the way for The Conformist, a film whose protagonist is on the opposite side of the ideological fence from Fabrizio. If there’s any complaint, it’s with some of the montages that look a bit too much like Godard lite (complete with jump cuts), but that is a small complaint. Most of the film has a visual elegance that prefigures Bertloucci’s better known works such as The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris. (This film’s beautiful black and white photography is by Aldo Scavarda, who shot Antonioni’s great L’Avventura.) Some of the film’s later scenes, where we see Fabrzio and his fiancée meet Gina at a performance of Verdi’s Macbeth are almost elegiac in their melancholy beauty. Rough going for some viewers, no doubt, but particularly rewarding of second and third viewings, Before the Revolution is a brilliant social document and masterful filmmaking.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.