Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) Bertolucci successfully earned his auteur stripes with his second feature; a film that debuted at Cannes, where it received the Critics' prize, and which confidently expressed Bertolucci's evolving stylistic, political and thematic inclinations.
The film also brandished the unapologetic cinephilia of its then twenty-three year old director, gloriously exemplified in a scene in which the respective screen merits of Anna Karina and Louise Brooks are celebrated, ending with the admonition that "one cannot live without Rossellini!"
Set in Parma - the city of Bertolucci's birth - in 1962, the film's male protagonist, Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), is a conduit for the director's evolving Oedipal, ideological and sentimental preoccupations; currents which reverberate through Bertolucci's later films, from the conflicted male protagonists of The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist (both from 1970), to the transgressive mother-son relationship at the centre of La Luna (1979) and the nascent political and erotic consciousness of the triangular friendship explored in The Dreamers (2003).
Shot by Aldo Scavarda (Antonioni's cinematographer on L'Avventura) the film features an arrestingly febrile performance by Adriana Asti (Bertolucci's then partner) as Gina, Fabrizio's "modern" aunt from Milan and neurotically skittish lover.
New 35mm print.
"Still Bertolucci's freshest film, an underrated beacon in the new European cinema of the early 1960s" - Cinematheque Annotations on Film
