before the revolution (w&d bertolucci w. gianni amico)

If I was looking for a contemporary filmic reference point for Bertolucci’s early, neo-romantic drama, it would be his fellow Italian, Guadagnino’s, Call Me by Your Name. Both films are constructed around the premise of an illicit sexual relationship which profoundly shapes the consciousness of their young protagonists. However, Bertolucci’s film ultimately feels far more transgressive than Guadagnino’s. It recounts the love affair of Fabrizio, a handsome, intellectually confused young man, with his aunt, Gina, a beautiful, slightly tragic figure, who has few qualms about seducing her nephew. There’s one breathless scene, where, with the family falling asleep after dinner, Gina and Fabrizio dance together in front of them. Seeing that they are the only ones awake, they cannot resist the desire to kiss. It’s a protracted kiss, charged with the risk of terrible, instantaneous scandal, filmed in close up, with the audience as conscious of the other people in the room as they are of the lovers, just as they themselves must be. We become complicit in their illicit affair; something which, watching it over fifty years later is still dramatically potent, even shocking, because incest is one of the last remaining taboos. In Italy in the mid 1960s it must have been a coruscating scene to watch.

The film is peppered with remarkable moments such as this, sandwiched between scenes with slightly less convincing dialogue. Whenever Fabrizio attempts to articulate his pre-revolutionary, bourgeois angst, he comes across as a vapid, spoilt youth. But when he is living this precipitous affair with his aunt, he becomes an audacious radical. Bertolucci’s film rightly puts its finger on the Chekhovian premise that the revolution begins at home, with the decisions people take in their most intimate moments pre-figuring political change. (Something Foucault was also writing about). In many ways, Before the Revolution is a parlour piece, a melodrama set in a provincial town. Parma is beautifully filmed, and there’s even the hint of an eco-message in the Antonioni-esque closing sequence, set in marshes which are soon to be sold off and drained. However, this is a parlour piece endowed with all the recourses of cinema, with some remarkable camerawork and a compelling score by Ennio Morricone. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the striking crowd scenes, which depict day-to-day Parma life, and then zoom in to pick out the protagonists as they search for one another in the madding crowd: at the same time part of the mass, but also alienated individuals trying to find in one another a reason to overcome the banality of bourgeois living. 

This mash-up of the intimate, domestic family drama, (echoes to be found also in Coppola and Scorsese), allied to an epic approach, make for a film which feels as though it’s talking about its generation, even if it does so before, as the title states, the fireworks of the revolution are set off.