Future director Francesco Barilli stars in this film about a young radical torn between his rebellious political views and the easy middle-class lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Barilli rebels in another way as well, engaging in a love affair with his pretty aunt (Adriana Asti), but soon becomes conflicted in that area as well, choosing in the end to conform to traditional expectations. This early Bernardo Bertolucci film makes a bit too much of its protagonist's philosophical underpinnings, but is filled with ...
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Future director Francesco Barilli stars in this film about a young radical torn between his rebellious political views and the easy middle-class lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Barilli rebels in another way as well, engaging in a love affair with his pretty aunt (Adriana Asti), but soon becomes conflicted in that area as well, choosing in the end to conform to traditional expectations. This early Bernardo Bertolucci film makes a bit too much of its protagonist's philosophical underpinnings, but is filled with amusing allusions to various films and literary works in its attempt to explore themes of man's surrender to societal pressures. Bertolucci later explored the same themes on a much larger canvas in his controversial classic 1900. Robert Firsching, Rovi
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Seller's Description:
High Quality Import in Italian. Bernardo Bertolucci somewhat coyly claimed to have based BEFORE THE REVOLUTION on Stendhal's THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA. The connnection is a tenuous one, but the hero, Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), does reflect his literary counterpart in that he possesses a naïveté he cannot recognize. Fabrizio is trapped in a bourgeois world, betrothed to a pious simp named Clelia. A friend's suicide causes him to question his life, however, and he falls under the influence of a leftist professor (like Clerici in THE COMFORMIST) who encourages Fabrizio's political awakening. He also begins an affair with his beautiful, emotional aunt Gina (Adriana Asti). But Gina can be cruel and impulsive, and should their love fail, Fabrizio's fragile new self might not survive. The story is told in the nonnarrative style Bertolucci later employed in PARTNER and to some extent in THE CONFORMIST; the director trusts bold imagery (in black and white) and terse, loaded dialogue to bring the characters from start to finish. The feel is self-consciously early-1960s, and Bertolucci addresses this zeitgeist in a set piece in which Fabrizio discusses cinema with a café patron.
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