General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Before the Revolution

Before the Revolution (Italian: Prima della rivoluzione) is a 1964 Italian drama directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, his second feature film, about a young bourgeois Marxist in Parma who breaks with his class, enters a secret affair with his aunt, and finally returns to the bourgeois life he meant to escape.¹ Bertolucci made it when he was 22 years old, two years after his debut The Grim Reaper (1962).²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964; his second feature, made at age 22¹^•²
Setting	Parma, 1962, among the well-to-do bourgeoisie⁴^•⁵
Principal cast	Adriana Asti (Gina), Francesco Barilli (Fabrizio), Allen Midgette (Agostino), Morando Morandini (Cesare), Cristina Pariset (Clelia)⁶
Key crew	Screenplay Bertolucci and Gianni Amico; cinematography Aldo Scavarda; editing Roberto Perpignani; music Ennio Morricone, with songs by Gino Paoli and contributions by Gato Barbieri¹^•⁷
Literary source	Characters named after figures in Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Bertolucci's favorite novel at the time³
Title	Taken from a remark attributed to the 18th-century French diplomat Talleyrand: "He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is"³
Reception	93% on the Rotten Tomatoes critics' Tomatometer (15 reviews); 67% audience score⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Fabrizio, a twenty-year-old Marxist from a wealthy Parma family, is determined to break with his social class, which includes his fiancée Clelia.⁴ The probable suicide of his friend Agostino, a victim of his own ideological disorientation, precipitates an inner crisis in Fabrizio that only Gina, his young aunt from Milan who has come to rest at her sister's after a depression, intuits and understands.⁴^•¹ The two, deeply different in temperament and outlook, love each other in secret until the passion of the relationship dies out, in part because Fabrizio cannot manage Gina's neuroses.⁴

Left alone, Fabrizio tries to resolve his conflicts in conversation with Cesare, an elementary-school teacher who has long been his ideological guide.¹ The two walk together in the Parco Ducale during the Festa dell'Unità, the Communist Party's festival, where Fabrizio loses his last illusions before what he sees as the petty-bourgeois model the party now offers: "The people blindly accept what they are given. It frightens me... You see, I wanted a new man, a humanity of children who would be fathers to their fathers."⁴ Considering himself defeated, he renounces revolutionary ambitions and returns, resigned, to his bourgeois roots by marrying Clelia.⁴

Style and influences

The film is deeply indebted to the French New Wave, with its freewheeling approach, talkiness, and cinephilia, and it pays open homage to Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci's primary French inspiration.²^•³ Critics have described sequences broken into discontinuous shots with disconcerting jump cuts and mismatched edits, cut less to serve the narrative than as a fragmentary montage.⁹ The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of books on film and longtime contributor to the Chicago Reader, writes that the film is in some ways closer to a poetry collection than a novel, and that it is constructed around individual pieces of music, pop, jazz, and classical, culminating in a premiere of Verdi's opera Macbeth heard off-camera but never seen.³

Bertolucci uses his lenses persistently, zooming in and out and shifting focus; the camera pans, tracks, and dollies, and the editing plays audaciously with direction, angles, and continuity.¹⁰ Two striking ellipses stand out: an iris-in encircling Fabrizio with a rose in his mouth, and an almost surreal insertion of color frames as Gina observes Fabrizio through a camera obscura.¹⁰ The Larousse film dictionary notes that the film refers openly to Stendhal through a Charterhouse sequence, the only one in color, which is also a reflection on the power of cinema.⁷

Themes

The film stages the collision between Marx and Freud through Fabrizio's struggle to reconcile his idealism with his class, declaring at a workers' rally, "My bourgeois future is in my bourgeois past."³ Philip French, writing in The Guardian, describes the protagonist as a twenty-year-old introspective upper-middle-class student both attracted to and repelled by middle-class conformity and revolutionary Marxism, and notes that the incestuous affair with a young aunt is a recurrent theme in Bertolucci's work.⁵ Rosenbaum observes that the bisexuality featured more directly in Bertolucci's later films is already present in embryonic form in Fabrizio's attachment to Agostino, who commits suicide just before the affair with Gina begins.³

Release and reception

The film premiered at Cannes and met with a modest, esteem-based reception in Italy; when it reached France four years later it was acclaimed as the breakthrough of a gifted beginner.⁷ A Padua thesis on Bertolucci records that the film won several prizes at the Cannes and New York festivals but was generally disdained by Italian critics, who found it an immature love story; French criticism, a few years later, gave it far wider recognition, and in 1968 it was re-released in its definitive version to notable success, feeding, according to some, the already lively flame of Italy's 1968 movement.¹¹ Release dates listed by Cineuropa include France on 9 May 1964, Italy on 2 October 1964, the United Kingdom in 1965, West Germany on 2 July 1968, and Portugal on 30 December 1976.¹

Retrospective assessments have been strongly positive. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it a cerebral and involving film whose vigor is undimmed after 47 years; Philip French called it a dazzling film and something of a time capsule; and Pauline Kael wrote that it "doesn't widen the screen; it makes you widen your eyes."⁸ The film is particularly loved by filmmakers: the film scholar Federico Zecca records testimonies by Martin Scorsese and Glauber Rocha in the same issue of the journal Cinegrafie.¹² The Berlinale retrospective program selected by Martin Scorsese, Young at Heart: Coming of Age at the Movies, describes it as an essayistic-experimental film that evokes the emotional landscape before the upheavals of the late sixties.¹³

Versions and runtime

Published running times for the film range from 100 to 115 minutes. Cineuropa lists 115 minutes and Fondazione Prada 114 minutes, while Rotten Tomatoes and Larousse give 1 hour 55 minutes, the Berlinale program and Flicks give 107 minutes, and the Cinémathèque française lists 100 minutes for a 1963 print.¹^•⁴^•⁸^•⁷^•¹³^•⁶ The Cinémathèque's 1963 dating and the 1968 re-release in a "definitive version" indicate that more than one cut has circulated.⁶^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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