Before the Revolution

Before the Revolution

Before the Revolution

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION is a romantic drama film about the maturation of a rebellious young man who, because of his bourgeois origin, lives an easy life. This is the story of torn characters and revolutionary ideals. It is very cold review of the generation gap in Italy. Fabrizio, a young student in Parma, examines the relations between the middle class and the Communist Party in Italy. He is traumatized by the death of his friend, who has drowned in the River Po. To make matters worse, his beautiful and ten years older aunt Gina from Milan becomes part of his love life. Fabrizio is torn between his weaknesses, aspirations, ambitions and loving care, but a life decision must be made... Mr. Bertolucci has put a young and beautiful woman at the center of a chaotic love story, which swirls around an immature young man. That young man constantly searches his place in modern civilization flows, and rebels against everything. He comes into contact with an abstract philosophy, art and passionate love. On the other side is an unfortunate young woman, who further complicates the life of an adolescent. She only seeks his understanding and love. The collapse of a revolution is reflected through the inability of giving and receiving love. A period of a vulnerability, emotional meltdown and alienation comes after that. An authentic scenery and soundtrack harmoniously fit into this uncertain story. Francesco Barilli as Fabrizio has offered a good performance of a torn young man who constantly taps in place. Adriana Asti in role of his aunt Gina has picked up my sympathies as a beautiful and unhappy young woman who plays love games with her nephew. A delicious French food in Italian style.

From director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor), I found this Italian film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I hoped I would agree with the four stars out of five that critics gave it, so I watched it and hoped for the best. Basically the film tells the story of teenager Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), he is a young man nearing adulthood, he is a passionate and idealistic youth who lives with his aunt. Cesare (Morando Morandini), a teacher and Marxist who is engaged to lovely but bourgeois Clelia (Cristina Pariset), Cesare influences many of Fabrizio's decisions, and Fabrizio is still grieving for the death, possibly suicide, of his volatile friend Agostino (Allen Midgette). Following Agostino's funeral Fabrizio begins a love affair with alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted and unhinged Gina (Adriana Asti), but then she swings the other way and sleeps with a stranger. They visit Cesare often, and Gina's older landowner friend Puck (Cecrope Barilli), their futures seem to be bleak with the relationship problems, losing land and much more, and this contrasts with what is going on with Italy and the country's future. Also starring Domenico Alpi as Fabrizio's father and Amelia Bordi as Fabrizio's mother. I have to be honest that I only vaguely paid attention to the story within the more serious stuff going on, and I found it hard to concentrate on the majority of the film's material, and not just because of having to read subtitles, I don't think I would watch it again to try and understand it better, I know it is not a bad political drama. Worth watching, in my opinion!

After his début, The Grim Reaper (1962), the then 22-year old Bernardo Bertolucci made this, Before the Revolution, an often astonishing homage to the ongoing French New Wave movement and a work of almost unbelievable maturity given his age. Set very much after the revolution, presumably referring to the Italian unification, this is undoubtedly a bleak film, looking back on Italy's history with blind, fond nostalgia, and staring into the abyss of their future. Despite the occasional Marxist monologue, the film is in no ways political, and instead focuses on very human drama, with characters seemingly locked into their social roles and resigned to their fate. The handsome and idealistic Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is destined to marry his childhood sweetheart Clelia (Cristina Pariset), a beautiful woman teetering on aristocracy. After his friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) drowns in a possible suicide, he falls headlong into a potentially dangerous love affair with his aunt Gina (Adriana Asti). Gina is unpredictable, highly emotional and possibly borderline mentally ill, but she is also attractive, seductive and wilful, challenging for the sullen Fabrizio. The death of Agostino clearly damages the passionate Fabrizio, whose studies of Marxism with his teacher and friend Cesare (Morando Morandini) had made him outspoken, but now finds himself blindly wandering into the bourgeoisie. The film doesn't really have a plot as such, but is instead a collection of scenes and interplays that channel Bertolucci's somewhat pessimistic views of Italy in the 1960's. The characters seem locked in the past, a past that they weren't alive for, and as Fabrizio states, full of nostalgia for the present, as if every passing moment is somehow being snatched away from them. It's best summarised in what is undoubtedly the stand-out scene in the movie, as they visit Puck (Cecrope Barilli), a man crippled with so much debt that he is soon to lose his beloved land. While the camera stays calm and graceful throughout the film, Puck laments as the camera sweeps into their air over rivers and forests, Ennio Morricone's astounding score blaring over the visuals. It's a beautiful moment, full of sad longing that reminded me of Sam the Lion's moving monologue in The Last Picture Show (1971) - one of favourite moments in cinema. Although this is clearly a wink to Godard and the French New Wave, Bertolucci takes a much more controlled approach to the direction. The camera often glides slowly from side to side, switching character focus as they talk, filmed in crisp black-and-white. It was this approach that caused Godard to voice his displeasure at Bertolucci after viewing his masterpiece The Conformist (1970), claiming it to be too contrived. But cinema can be anything and everything you want it to be, and this makes for beautiful cinema, anchored by a powerful performance by Asti, who makes any possible taboo regarding her incestuous relationship with her nephew become redundant. This is much more than a simple love story, this is a film about a country, it's past and present. www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

competently made, good acting and interesting editing and camera movement. the film is the standard boy meets girl and loses girl and both are forever unhappy because of their stubbornness. though it's told in that art cinema way where the audience isn't quite sure what has happened in the relationship except that the nature of the relationship has changed. they become cold to each other and are conflicted about whether to stay or leave the relationship. the film feels episodic where scenes don't really fit in, but in each scene, the relationship changes a little. then there's the political part of the film, where the male protagonist questions whether it's possible for a wealthy young man to be part of a communist party. he runs into some people he knows and talk about the revolution and intellectual ideas. it's in these scenes, the film feels decidedly fench. i dunno, i'd probably watch too many french new wave films (more so than Italian ones) where people sit around and talk about revolutions, cinema and communism that i've come to associate these scenes as being french. i wasn't amazed by this film, but i enjoyed it enough and it did not drag on like some art films do. it's worth a look if you're interested in European art cinema of the 60s.

The overall plot deals with a young man drawn to his aunt set in Italy prior to its participation in the war. If you watch this film looking at the plot, actor performances, whether it is well directed, etc, you will miss its beauty. You need to relax, sit back and enjoy the juxtaposition of the visual over the music, especially in the last half. It is a wonderful experience. Bertolucci obviously decided not to conform to the intellectualism of Fellini or the structured approach of Zeffirelli. The scene at the theatre, where the young man faces his aunt, set to the background of the opera is almost a dance. Give the left brain a rest and enjoy.

One of the typical ploys of modernist artists has been to take a known work, and to use that as a basis for experimentation. In this case, Bernardo Bertolucci (at the age of 22!) took Stendhal's novel THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA and used the basic plot and characters, only Bertolucci abstracted these elements, taking them for granted and simply creating a wide-ranging collage of impressions and emotions. But the central love affair between Fabrizio and his aunt, Gina (the names of the characters in the Stendhal), is the motivating heart of the film; the suggestions of incest, the need for secrecy, the impacted emotion because of the covertness: these provide PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE with a core of great integrity, so that the more "random" elements (the scene with the lament on the lake, the scene at the opera, the scene where the friend rides the bicycle in circles, etc.) are able to reflect on Bertolucci's feelings regarding politics, class, revolution, art, the search for belief. PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE is one of the most youthful films ever made, as well it should be, since it was made by someone who was impossibly young at the time. I hate to say this, but it's the work of a prodigy, a gifted post-adolescent who is trying to find a form to contain his sometimes overwrought feelings about life, love, and politics. There had been many works catering to the teen crowd, movies like WHERE THE BOYS ARE or BEACH PARTY, but, aside from some of the works of Nicholas Ray (THEY LIVE BY NIGHT and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), no film artist had yet tried to use the medium as a vehicle for a vision of youthful passions from the inside: Godard would follow with MASCULINE FEMININE and LA CHINOISE, Bellocchio with FISTS IN THE POCKET, Skolimowski with LE DEPART and DEEP END, but Bertolucci was pioneering when he made this movie, and the fact that it's "flawed" should not be held against it, as it represents the expression of a very young artist, trying to express his emotions as directly as possible.

While hailed as many as a masterpiece (or near), I struggled with Bertolucci's 2nd film, made when he was only 23, although I am a fan of his in general. Beautifully shot, great use of music and unconventional editing, the film is excellent on a film-making and craft level (although it perhaps borrows too liberally from leading film-makers of the era, especially Godard, Antonioni and Resnais). The story of a young bourgeois man trying to come to terms with his tear between his attraction to communism and his desire for an easier life leads him into an incestuous affair with his somewhat older aunt. I found it's themes somewhat muddled, alternating between being heavy-handedly spelled out, or so obtuse I wasn't sure what a given scene was saying. The acting in particular seems a bit all over the place; understated to the point of flatness in one scene, and then almost theatrically over the top the next. At the end I felt glad I'd seen the film, but it didn't stick with me the way Bertolucci's first film "La Commare Secca" or his third "Partner" did. ("Partner" deals with some of the same themes, but in a far more playful, often comedic way). There was a film-school sort of pretentiousness and emotional distance in "Before the Revolution that kept me from feeling moved or from being led to think deeply about the ideas. That said, I am willing to revisit it and see if my reaction changes, and certainly I enjoyed Bertolucci's already masterful use of image and sound, even if the ends he was using them to were a bit muddled.

I was somewhat reluctant about this film. I felt that I would be disappointed cause The Sheltering Sky (by Bertolucci) is one of my favorite movies. I though that I could never like another film by him. I was wrong. Above all, they are very different films, so let's forget one of them. I remember when I first saw Fellini's 8 ½, and realizing that one of the reasons I loved it so much was the camera work and especially what you could call as the "relative motion between objects": the way the moon always stays in the same place as the trees pass by when you drive at night. Prima della Revoluzione is rich of beautiful camera work. Bertolucci tried it all, being so young. There are smooth movements like a ballet and stressful agitated shots. I felt humbled and privileged as I saw this film. Apart from more technical aspects, the movie interested me because of the abstract, strange and poetic love story between Gina and young idealist, Fabrizio. It's hard to say if it is love, why it is or not love… Here and there you will find beautiful monologues… I think this will touch everyone who has ever wanted to change the world… even if you have already forgotten those feelings.