Prima della rivoluzione

Fabrizio, an upper-class youth from Parma, is engaged to marry the daughter of a rich family. But Fabrizio is dissatisfied with the trappings of his class. He sympathises with communism and is close friends with working-class Agostino. After Agostino commits suicide, Fabrizio begins an incestuous affair with his young aunt, Gina. While she encourages the inchoate brooder (“I like you because you’re not a man yet”), he succumbs to melancholy feelings … Shot on Bertolucci’s home ground of Parma, Before the Revolution is a very personal work, sustained by intense dialogue and atmospheric images. It debunks the supposed sweetness of life in ostensibly tidy circumstances. In 1968, Bertolucci said, “There is both a kind of courage and a kind of complacency in my film: courage because the film is a kind of exorcism by which I try to burn the bridges with my childhood and adolescence; and a complacency because this voluntary break with my past produced a few tears on my part. I was twenty-three and I’d never known this ‘sweetness of life’.”