Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione)

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (Prima della rivoluzione)          A                    

Italy  (115 mi)  1964  d:  Bernardo Bertolucci

A flood of poetic visuals, montage, and sound, it is a shamelessly passionate, intensely personal statement of political and sexual coming of age.     
—Amos Vogel, writer, Cinema 16 programming pioneer, and founder of the New York Film Festival

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.  —Talleyrand

A rarely seen early work from Bernardo Bertolucci, and one of his best, made when he was just 22, loosely based on Stendhal’s early 19th century novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, adapted by the director into a more autobiographical work, something of an elegy both to the director’s home town of Parma and to those bourgeois lives doomed because they take place before the coming (late 60’s student) revolution, recalling Jean Renoir’s RULES OF THE GAME (1939) in its gracefully astute critique of a dying aristocracy, a work that offers glimpses of his coming masterworks THE CONFORMIST (1970) and 1900 (Novecento) (1976), but using a 60’s style that offers a unique blend of French New Wave and the spacious middle class ennui of Antonioni.  In fact, if one took a blind test and watched this film without knowing the director, many might guess Antonioni, as the lead female role played by Adriana Asti, who later stars with Vitti in Buñuel’s THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY (1974), is right out of the Monica Vitti catalogue of early 60’s performances in L’AVVENTURA (1960), L’ECLISSE (1962) and RED DESERT (1964), where she all but steals the picture with a fire and passion simply unseen in films today.  Italian women in this era won the hearts of international filmgoers as they thrived on their femininity, where an exposed vulnerability defines their character, often sexually misunderstood or taken for granted.  Asti is a mature and intelligent woman, but she needs to feel like a woman, something overlooked in the male dominated race into the future and completely absent in modern era films.  She’s initially presented in a playful manner, in tributes to other filmmakers, fashionably photographed in classical Antonioni, irreverently shown with her legs exposed from Godard, in a telephone monologue from Rossellini (“One can’t live without Rossellini!”), making funny faces with weird glasses from Truffaut, with a visual theater reference to Godard’s A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961).  If this film were released today, it would be a revelation, easily the best film seen all year, as the use of music, edits, and camera work are simply dazzling, an inventive and deeply complex work filled with more stylistic energy and celebratory verve, not to mention challenging ideas that are as relevant a half century later as when it was released. 

The unusual subject is the study of an intellectually curious youth on the verge of adulthood, Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), a stand-in for the director, and his sensuously attractive aunt ten years older, Gina (Asti), who is visiting from Milan.  The pace of the film is quick, with a constantly shifting narrative, where one of the lead characters meets an early demise, which is a shock even to the audience, especially coming off one of the best scenes in the entire film, where the outrageously upbeat circus style brass band, oomp pah music from Ennio Morricone is nothing less than sensational, leaving characters psychologically devastated, clinging to one another for comfort.  People respond to grief in mysterious ways, but Fabrizio and Gina seem drawn together, seen cavorting in the shadows of darkness and light in this gorgeous Black and White film with the legendary Vittorio Storaro operating the constantly moving camera, often holding tight on the lead characters, though the noted cinematographer is Aldo Scavarda, who also shot L’AVVENTURA.  Their work together is simply exquisite, balancing indoor and outdoor shots, some of which are simply magnificent, blending a beautifully written screenplay with spurts of intensely personal dialogue and perfectly composed interiors, where they become engulfed in the emptiness of the darkness, only to be revived by the briefest glimpses of light, where their first love scene is as erotic as anything Bertolucci’s ever filmed, even as they lie in separate beds, where the director is completely in tune with their thoughts and inclinations.  Their affection takes each of them by surprise, where she still sees him as an often confused young boy, a budding Communist thinker under the influence of his Marxist teacher Cesare (Morando Morandini), already engaged to a lovely but relatively mindless bourgeois girlfriend Clelia (Cristina Pariset), shades of Stefania Sandrelli in THE CONFORMIST.  Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy and mixed emotions, often seductive and sexually alluring, but also distant and distracted.  What’s clear is they generate one of the most romantically explosive scenes in all of cinema, elegantly choreographed, where the closeness of the camera generates exceptional intimacy, seen here in a living room dance sequence to Gino Paoli’s Vivere Ancora YouTube (2:56). 

What’s truly unusual here is the wonderful balance of sex and politics, which is clearly vintage Bertolucci, where Fabrizio is stunned by the sudden absence of Gina afterwards, something emotionally inexplicable, made even more complicated when he sees her with another man.  As he walks away afterwards, she is conflicted about whether to follow, but as she looks in either direction, both forward and back, all she sees is a blur.  This romantic split opens the door to the political turmoil of the time, expressed in one of the strangest scenes of the film, set to the eerie sound of frogs croaking by the riverside, as landowners for generations are suddenly losing their mortgaged land by default, losing their aristocratic way of life, suddenly plunged into the mainstream with little or no skills to survive, brilliantly described by Gina’s friend Puck (Cecrope Barilli) Prima della rivoluzione/Before the Revolution (1964) - Po River scene YouTube (8:21) in a hauntingly beautiful scene of rare poetic transcendence that anticipates bleak futures to come. Rationally Fabrizio’s forced to struggle with his commitment to the Communist Party even as his emotional life hits the skids.  With extraordinary honesty and insight Bertolucci explores the emotional and political conflicts of Fabrizio, where in reevaluating his future, there’s no escaping his past, where those (the oppressed) that he wishes to liberate have little interest in the Communists and are more interested in joining the middle class.  Even as the Communists lead a Worker’s Day parade, Prima della rivoluzione/Before the Revolution (1964) - Communist Festival scene YouTube (6:30), something later memorialized in gloriously rich color in 1900 (Novecento), Fabrizio is pained to acknowledge the ineffectiveness of the Party, literally agonizing with Cesare over that promised day when the revolution will finally come.  This leads to an extended, visually sumptuous operatic sequence bringing all the forces together in a clash of conflicts, where the upper class is seen in all their fashionable regalia, but the Communists and Fabrizio’s family each have a box seat as well, where he’s there with Clelia, spotting Gina on the main floor, while the music to Verdi’s Macbeth plays throughout, a musical counterpoint to their internal struggles that dramatizes the complexity of their concerns, enlarged in this setting, becoming matters of life and death.  Fabrizio bypasses what is clearly the love of his life for the safer choice of the younger, less complicated Clelia, where the film ends at their wedding (an altar boy gets the giggles) with Gina sobbing in the face of another younger nephew, with their futures painfully uncertain.  The final literary coda from Melville’s Moby Dick couldn’t be more sobering, especially when seen as the thoughts of a lifelong Communist, whose merciless quest is to chase after the impossible and the unreachable.