“Before the Revolution” – Saturday 11/19

We’re hosting one of our, alas, decreasingly frequent Italian Film Nights on Saturday November 19, just before everyone slides into the year-end holiday chute. Cued up is Bertolucci's second feature (we showed his very capably done debut La commare secca a few years ago, but that was a work for hire), Prima della rivoluzione, better known in this country as Before the Revolution. It’s a young man’s film—he turned 23 just a couple of months before its release—and I think perhaps its hero’s conflicts might not resonate with Those of Us of a Certain Age quite the way they would have forty years ago, but it’s also deeply felt and very personal, and of course beautifully photographed.

Gerald Peary wrote a brief review of the film for the Boston Phoenix in 1999, from which I swipe this lengthy excerpt:

The protagonist, Fabrizio (furrow-browed Francisco Barilli), is, like the youthful filmmaker, girl-and-movie crazy, and Marx-and-Freud obsessed, a tie-and-coat high bourgeoisie trying to be a renegade and relate to the historic struggles of the masses. He lives in the dull city of Parma (where Bertolucci was born), has a torrid affair with Gina (Adriana Asti), his attractive young aunt from hip Milan, while he is drawn to the conventional, church-going, pretty younger thing, Clelia (Cristina Pariset).

Though Farbizio orders a suicide-prone friend to a screening of Hawks’s Red River, and though Farbizio takes a quick break to see Godard’s A Woman is a Woman, mostly he is too stressed and distracted by love and political concerns to benefit from filmgoing. So Bertolucci provides him with a hilarious cinephile friend, who spends his whole sentient life at the altar of movies (he sees them twice in a row). Afterward, he smokes and philosophizes about them. “I remember the 360 degree dolly shot of Nicholas Ray, I swear, one of the highest moral facts in the history of cinema,” this friend says, and, “Remember, one can’t live without Rossellini!”

Bertolucci, the film geek, is all over his shooting, as Before the Revolution is a perpetual homage to his cinema masters, old and new. Gina, alienated in fashionable clothes and photographed against architecture, comes from Antonioni, Gina in a telephone monologue from Rossellini, Gina framed formally with bare legs from Godard, Gina making faces in granny glasses from Truffaut. (It’s interesting to see Bertolucci in 1963 quoting A Woman is a Woman and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, both of 1961, as if they are already canonic texts.)

Bertolucci’s other source: Stendhal’s early 19th century novel, The Charterhouse of Parma. Thank you, Bernardo, for affording me an excuse to spend several long plane rides reading Stendhal's fabulous 500-page Machiavellian melodrama about the post-Napoleon political maneuverings in the city of Parma. What does it have to do with Before the Revolution? The names of the three main characters are the same—Fabrizio, Gina, and Clelia—and, in each case, Farbizio bypasses the love of his flashy aunt for that of a pious, straightlaced younger girl. And there’s stifling Parma, and there’s a common setting for high drama of the opera.

But the contrasts are far more telling. Gina of the book is the most conniving belle at court, almost as obsessed by power and riches as she is by conquering Fabrizio. Gina of the movie is a little lost rich girl, panicked and neurotic, a walking nervous breakdown with no aspirations except getting men to love her. (At times, she is a drag, and her multi-moods are the most tiresome part of the movie.) Fabrizio of the book is a soldier (he fights at Waterloo), an adventurer, a nobleman, an autocrat, a political opportunist with little worry of conscience. Bertolucci's Fabrizio is a person of acute self-consciousness, pained by his political ineffectuality (that of the bourgeois class) and agonized that the promised Marxist paradise will never come.

“It’s always before the revolution,’ he says, on a May day in Parma of unfurled red flags, practically bawling.

I might mention that the damn film has never been released on DVD in the United States (Criterion Collection? Hell-o-o-o?) and that for years it was represented in my collection with a tape-to-optical dub unsuited for social viewing. I have finally broken down and acquired the British DVD edition, which by means of some technical jiggery-pokery is playable on the equipment here. Alas, though, there will be no archival copy made available in the traditional drawing, since it would require a region-free DVD player with PAL-to-NTSC conversion circuitry. We’ll offer a nice copy of La commare secca instead.

The accustomed drill is in place. 2662 Harrison Street in Oakland’s potentially trendy Adams Point district, where the Food is Whole and the parking dire. We fling the doors open at 6:00—barely light by then this time of year, grumble, grumble—and serve a collection of appetizers and finger food equivalent to a proper meal (yes, there will be deviled eggs). The film is almost two hours long, so I’d like to cue it up by about 7:30.