Prima della rivoluzione

Bernardo Bertolucci (1964)

Set in Parma in 1962, Before the Revolution is about a young bourgeois who’s intending to devote himself to the Communist cause but who finds distractions that change his mind – or rather deepen his ambivalence.  I came to the film knowing it was regarded as autobiographical (although not precisely so:  by 1962, Bertolucci had already made La commare secca) and that it had some connection with La chartreuse de Parme (the relationship between the two principals echoes the Stendhal novel and these characters are named for their literary inspirations).  With these assumptions in mind, I wasn’t sure, during the first half hour, if the film was ever going to develop a life of its own.  In the interview with Bertolucci used as the BFI programme note (Sally managed to get the last one of these – how do they manage to run out when it isn’t even a full house?), he’s quoted as saying that each of the main characters – not just his obvious alter ego Fabrizio – ‘is me’.  In the early stages, you get the impression that Bertolucci is interested primarily in having the people on the screen express his own thoughts.  He seems to be divvying up the moral and philosophical insights without giving the characters individual voices.

What’s so remarkable about Before the Revolution is that, in spite of this, it gradually acquires a vital independence and psychological dynamism through the brilliance of the film-making.   An outstanding example:  halfway through, Bertolucci introduces the character of Puck, a wealthy landowner and friend of Gina, the aunt (some ten years older than him) with whom Fabrizio is having an affair.   Puck bemoans his failing fortunes; Fabrizio lays into the rich man for developing a social conscience only when his own financial security is under threat.  You think it’ll be impossible for this sequence to do anything more than make political points:  how can Puck’s words matter when it’s the first time we’ve seen him and he doesn’t yet mean anything to us as a character?   But the combination of images which Puck’s lament accompanies – the trees, the lake, everything on the estate that’s going to be lost – is so compelling that his words do have emotional heft.  What’s more, and in spite of what Fabrizio says to Puck, those images also connect with Fabrizio’s own commitment to living in the moment because each moment is transient.

Pauline Kael confused the excitement of the twenty-three-year-old Bertolucci’s artistry with the character of Fabrizio when she wrote that the director (he also wrote the screenplay, with Gianni Amico) ‘captures what has rarely been seen on the screen – the extravagance and poetry of youthful ardor’.  Francesco Barilli as Fabrizio isn’t ardent but he is extremely convincing as this handsome, humourless young man who can’t make up his mind what he wants but is dogmatically censorious when it comes to putting other people right.  (Kael is much nearer the mark when she describes Fabrizio as ‘callowly doctrinaire’.)  And Barilli’s inchoate quality – the sense of possibility he embodies – is appealing, especially in his scenes with Gina.   (A quick Google search reveals that Barilli, just twenty when the film was made, hasn’t acted much but has had success as a writer, director and painter over the last forty years.  His uncle, Cecrope Barilli, also a painter, plays Puck.)  Already well known through her roles in Rocco and His Brothers and Accattone, Adriana Asti is undoubtedly the star presence.  Since she subsequently married Bertolucci (and is seven years his senior), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the increasing concentration on Gina-Asti in Before the Revolution reflects a further autobiographical layer.

Because Fabrizio is the central consciousness, it’s a little distracting – beguiling as Adriana Asti is – when the sophisticated but screwed up Gina takes over.  (She gets involved with her nephew while on a visit to Parma from Milan, where she now lives and works.)  Gina is, though, truly at the centre of the finest resonance in the film.   Dancing with Fabrizio in his family’s home, Gina then invites her younger nephew Enore (Guido Fanti) to partner her and he obliges with sheepish reluctance.  It’s a charming but charged moment:  as Fabrizio watches smilingly (and he rarely smiles), we get a sense that Gina, as she holds the younger brother, is aware of how young the other nephew, to whom she’s now sexually attracted, still is – of how part of her wants Fabrizio to be the boy she remembers and that Enore still is.   (While Fabrizio embraces the ephemerality of things, Gina tells him in one of their conversations that she prefers things to stay the same.)   The reprise is piercing when, in the final scene at Fabrizio’s wedding to Clelia (Cristina Pariset), Gina hugs the (once again embarrassed) Enore to console her, and can’t let him go.

The title derives from Talleyrand’s remark – ‘He who did not live in the years before the [1789] Revolution cannot understand the sweetness of living’.  Bertolucci uses it as an epigraph at the start of the film but its more interesting use comes later, when  Fabrizio acknowledges that, for a sensibility like his, life will always be ‘before the revolution’.  The obstructions to complete political commitment come in the shape of sex, social and familial convention, and cinema – and these competing imperatives modify Fabrizio’s allegiance to any one of them.   The sexual education that Gina gives him precedes marriage to a lovely, innocuous young girl – just what his parents (Amelia Bordi and Domenico Alpi), against whom he means to rebel, wanted.   Fabrizio’s love of film depends on the mood he’s in:  he drifts into a picture house when his mind is on Gina (Une femme est une femme is showing) and emerges arm in arm with an exhaustingly wholehearted but likeably self-aware film bore (Gianni Amico?):  the latter predicts that Anna Karina will define their generation and reminds Fabrizio that life is impossible without Rossellini.    The climactic sequence at the opera – the opening night of a production of local hero Verdi’s Macbeth, which also sees the ending of Fabrizio’s affair with Gina ­– is thrilling.  It’s a superb orchestration of emotional, visual and musical movement.  Fabrizio is up in a box with Clelia and her mother (Ida Pellegri); his mother and grandmother (Iole Lunardi – an amazing face) are down in the stalls, and are joined there by Gina.  She and Fabrizio then leave their seats and he tracks her down in the theatre entrance while the opera is still going on.  (Opera’s at its best when it’s supplying dramatic context in a film drama …)

A great thing about Bertolucci is that he’s no less powerfully expressive when what’s on screen isn’t obviously exciting.  An early shot of an empty road and Fabrizio’s friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) cycling down it communicates an extraordinary sense of the calm and desolation of ennui.  (Agostino, who dies – drowns himself? – shortly afterwards, remains an opaque character, though.)  The handsome claustrophobia of the Parma town square, Gina’s walk to the station in the rain, with Fabrizio’s Communist mentor Cesare helping carry her luggage – these images have the texture of something remembered.  They may be built from the director’s personal memories but they feel so precisely real that they fuse with one’s own.   Bertolucci also has an acute understanding of what he can achieve by what he doesn’t show.  In the first half of Before the Revolution, the name of Cesare is frequently invoked by Fabrizio but the man is never seen.  This builds up our expectations and means that, when we do meet Cesare and he turns out to be honourable but also bespectacled, uncharismatic and faintly defeated (he’s well played by Morando Morandini), our slightly guilty feelings of anti-climax connect with Fabrizio’s inability to adopt Communism wholeheartedly.  At the end, as he and Clelia leave the church, we never quite see Fabrizio’s face, which is always obscured by the other wedding guests.  It’s as if he’s chickened out of being the man he might have been, effacing himself in the process.   The cinematographer was Aldo Scavardi and this early score by Ennio Morricone is one of his best, less obviously melodious but also less smoothly predictable than the music he’s best known for.  It was very frustrating that the subtitles didn’t supply translations of the several pop songs we hear playing or of a song sung to Gina by a young girl (Evelina Alpi).

20 April 2011