Nothing dates as badly as films that seemed revolutionary in their day, whereas films that seemed common-place have, perhaps surprisingly, grown in depth. Films like "The Searchers" and "Vertigo" are so much more than what appears on the surface while a film like "Performance" now feels like a bag of tricks. Bertolucci was only 23 when he made "Before the Revolution" and he brought to it a young man's brio. If he was mimicking anyone it was the trend-setting mystique of Antonioni and perhaps the Rossellini of "Journey to Italy", (referenced here), rather than the old Italian masters like Visconti and De Sica. This was a film that confirmed Bertolucci as an extraordinary new talent, full of visual daring and breaking very much with convention.
He used Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma" as a jumping off point to tell the story of Fabrizio, a young bourgeois Italian in love with his pretty young aunt and today the film still looks remarkable; one can see why such a fuss was made of him. Its faults, however, are also fairly obvious. The material now seems thin, even trite, while many of the effects feel dated and very much of their period, (how shocked were audiences at the idea of incest in 1964? How shocked are we now?).
Nevertheless, the film remains essential and not just as part of the Bertolucci canon. It's essential if we want to understand the revolution that was sixties cinema. We may no longer think of it as Bertolucci's best film but we can still marvel at how audacious it felt back then while still feeling a little superior in our knowledge that cinema has continued to deepen and to develop in the intervening years.
He used Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma" as a jumping off point to tell the story of Fabrizio, a young bourgeois Italian in love with his pretty young aunt and today the film still looks remarkable; one can see why such a fuss was made of him. Its faults, however, are also fairly obvious. The material now seems thin, even trite, while many of the effects feel dated and very much of their period, (how shocked were audiences at the idea of incest in 1964? How shocked are we now?).
Nevertheless, the film remains essential and not just as part of the Bertolucci canon. It's essential if we want to understand the revolution that was sixties cinema. We may no longer think of it as Bertolucci's best film but we can still marvel at how audacious it felt back then while still feeling a little superior in our knowledge that cinema has continued to deepen and to develop in the intervening years.