Masterful: Bernardo Bertolucci’s second film reveals a precocious talent
10 April 2012
Bernardo Bertolucci was only 22 when he made his second film in 1964, and both the vices and virtues of youthful confidence are apparent in its muddied complexity and fluid brilliance.
He was inspired by Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma but Shakespeare,Verdi and Freud are also influences as the bourgeois Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) becomes obsessed with his teacher's Marxist ideas and with the sexual charms of his Aunt Gina.
The dilettante hero may at least partly be the director himself as he realises that to be a revolutionary is harder than he imagines.
Be that as it may, the film shows Bertolucci forming his own style and playing with cinema with enormous precocity and zeal.
Before The Revolution
Cert: 12A
