BEFORE THE REVOLUTION Movie Review

Prima della Rivoluzione

Those of us who either toyed with or obsessed on the idea of revolution in the 1960s, only to retreat home each evening to the safety of spouse, bed, and television, will respond as powerfully as ever to the second film by Bernardo Bertolucci, made when he was only 24. Based loosely on Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma, Before the Revolution is the story of a young man (Francisco Barilli) who takes up Marxism as if it were a hobby, but finds himself thinking ahead too quickly; imagining the privileges and bourgeois pleasures (including, perhaps, his newly kindled affair with his lovely young aunt) that will be lost to him should his newfound “idealism” actually succeed. An early example of the grand, operatic style that Bertolucci would take still further with The Conformist, 1900, and Luna (his most underrated film), Before the Revolution also represents his first commercial breakthrough, possibly because the movie's theme of romanticism and pleasure versus idealism and pain is the kind of dilemma that patrons of “art” movies are well aware of. (Despite the fact that the festival prize-winner we may be sitting through is probably good for us, who among us doesn't also crave an occasional, “decadent,” mayhem-heavy Hollywood entertainment?) Bertolucci's emotional honesty here is both admirable and moving; his directorial assurance is quietly staggering.

NEXT STOP … The Conformist, La Chinoise, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

1965 115m/C IT Francesco Barilli, Adrianna Asti, Alain Midgette, Morando Morandini, Domenico Alpi; D: Bernardo Bertolucci; W: Bernardo Bertolucci; C: Aldo Scavarda; M: Ennio Morricone, Gino Paoli. VHS NYF