BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

Finally, in the “Critics’ Week” we saw the Italian feature film Before the Revolution, by that Bernardo Bertolucci who, after The Grim Reaper, had already been advised to sit down and wait to finish growing up.

It’s a tired, old-age film that typically plagues the top of the class. A sophisticated mess in which the best pieces of the nouvelle vague and the worst pieces of Antonioni last manner find their place, echoes of cinema-truth, fringes by Rossellini and waste of Resnais and Godard. And, why not, also from Matarazzo.

The New York Film Festival is still capable of surprises.

Last night, Philharmonic Hall presented Before the Revolution, an unheralded Italian feature by an unknown writer-director named Bernardo Bertolucci. He is 23 years old, and his film is a beauty.

So is its star. Adriana Asti, a large-eyed brunette making her celluloid debut, appeared onstage with the director to take a modest bow before the screening. Her unfamiliar face meant little to the audience at the time. Before the evening was over, it had become a face that discerning filmgoers are unlikely to forget.

She is the focal point of a poignant love story epitomizing a young man’s growth through the dense, chaotic jungle of contemporary civilization. Like many of the best modern films, the drama is difficult, subtle and extraordinarily complex in its imagery.

Mr. Bertolucci, who is nothing if not ambitious, has attempted a symbolic autobiography that is classical in its construction. Fabrizio, the protagonist, is a Stendhal character, residing in Parma and ultimately marrying a bourgeois girl named Clélia. He is also an Italian Holden Caufield, flailing his adolescent limbs and querying intellect against the social structures of 1962.

The title derives from Talleyrand – “Only those who lived before the revolution knew how sweet life could be”. In a typical gesture of searching youth, the boy revolts against everything in his surroundings – his respectable middle-class family, his lovely but dull childhood sweetheart, the political climate in his provincial town. He dallies with Communism, with abstract philosophy, with art, and, most meaningfully, with his striking, unhappy young aunt, who falls hopelessly in love while realizing she is only filling an adolescent’s temporary need.

It is a moving story on the most immediate level, and the director has given it sweeping connotations. When the boy, unable to cope with the extraordinary women, abandons his struggles and lets her drift away, the drama reverberates with evocations of loss. His failure at love symbolizes a death of the past, and angst-ridden sense of futility in any kind of revolutionary striving, whether emotional, political or merely intellectual, amid the defeat of contemporary society.

Viewing life in such romantic terms is the special province of a very young director, but Mr. Bertolucci has approached his story with such deep feeling that its full implications are communicated. This is a young man’s film, but it has large social references.

Cinematically, it is also filled with references, to the best modern directors in Italy and France. Knowledgeable viewers can detect strong influences from Roberto Rossellini and Alain Resnais in Mr. Bertolucci’s sophisticated style.

Astonishingly, he has managed to assimilate a high degree of filmic and literary erudition into a distinctively personal visual approach. Technically, he displays authoritative control. Here is a new talent of outstanding promise.

A boyish nonprofessional, Francesco Barilli, is ideally cast as the groping Fabrizio, but Miss Asti is so stunning as the aunt that her character takes over the film. Amid a cast of inexperienced actors, she displays a stage-trained skill and an impressive presence that mark her for an impressive future on the screen.

Before the Revolution will be released in this country by Angelo Rizzoli. It is the revelation of the festival.

Far from being the ecstatic admirers who, especially in France, used absolute superlatives with not too much relevance for Bernardo Bertolucci’s second feature film, we don’t want to agree with the large group of furious detractors of Italian critics, who have treated Before the Revolution as if it wasn’t a step up from The Grim Reaper. It is, however, in our opinion and, although fraught with defects, it presents itself as one of the most original works of inspiration that has come to us in recent times by a young director: however, far from the now blissfully routinier trend of Italian cinema, far from the surrender no less habitual to the so-called “laws of the market”, far from the comfortable artifices of the easy plot, the pacifying happy ending, the pimping wink at the spectator seen as an underdeveloped one to entertain rather than as a person to talk to. And it is undoubtedly with the spectator, that Bertolucci tries to get in touch: with that impetuousness, and even with that presumption typical of young people, if you like, but undoubtedly with the will to reflect and to give in an autobiographical key some lines of the crisis that has hit leftist intellectuals in recent years.

Written and directed at the tender age of 22, this impressive second feature from 1964 by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci (now enjoying a retrospective at BFI Southbank) looks at political and romantic uncertainty among the youth of Parma. As the seeds of revolution germinate, Francesco Barilli’s young Fabrizio embarks on a period of intense contemplation regarding his commitment to the Communist Party and his desire to distance himself from bourgeois decadence. Soon to be wed to stunning and wealthy Clelia (Cristina Pariset) and reeling from a friend’s death, Fabrizio’s attentions are diverted towards his charismatic, troubled aunt, Gina (Adriana Asti, pictured). She confuses Fabrizio to the point where the lure of his entitlement is all the more enticing.

A leisurely, verbose and stylish film made by thinkers for thinkers, Before the Revolution feels like it’s caught between two stools: it lacks the acute social observation found in Bertolucci’s stunning debut, The Grim Reaper’(1963), but it also fails to achieve the levels of free-flowing fizz displayed in his follow-up, Partner (1968). He juggles with too many influences, to the point where the film feels like a compendium of nods and winks: we’ve seen these loping, well-heeled types in Antonioni’s films filling the void of social responsibility with art, religion and politics. We’ve seen snap-talking cinephiles touting Nicholas Ray’s use of a 360-degree pan in Godard. Still, that doesn’t detract from the virtuoso camerawork, Ennio Morricone’s rippling score and the melancholy reminder that for the young and politcally engaged, the ‘revolution’ is always just over the horizon.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1964 film was made when he was just 22 years old. With its freewheeling approach, its passion, its talkiness and cinephilia, it is unmistakably influenced by the French new wave. Yet it has a very Italian and distinctively patrician concern with Catholicism and Marxism. The title is taken from a remark from Talleyrand about life being sweet before the revolution; the sentiment is here applied with irony. Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is a well-to-do young man, troubled by the ethical demands of communism, and in angry revolt against his stultifying family. He begins a secret affair with his elegant, mercurial aunt Gina (Adriana Asti), a transgression that clarifies and intensifies his general discontent. Is this a pre-revolutionary mood? Or is this the revolution itself, the spiritual revolution, in authentic progress? A cerebral and involving film whose vigour is undimmed after 47 years.

Before the revolution rather disappointed the Italian Marxists who saw it. They expected something else, a colder, more evil film. In the exergue, there is Talleyrand’s sentence, but I could have put the same sentence at the end and the meaning of the film would have been simpler, because the counterpoint between the crying aunt, Fabrizio getting married and this sentence would have been clear. But I don’t like very clear things so much, so I chose to place it at the beginning. Those who live before the revolution do not experience the sweetness, in my sense, but the anguish of living, and this, almost no Italian critic has heard.