Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

runamokprods While hailed as many as a masterpiece (or near), I struggled with Bertolucci's 2nd film, made when he was only 23, although I am a fan of his in general. Beautifully shot, great use of music and unconventional editing, the film is excellent on a film-making and craft level (although it perhaps borrows too liberally from leading film-makers of the era, especially Godard, Antonioni and Resnais). The story of a young bourgeois man trying to come to terms with his tear between his attraction to communism and his desire for an easier life leads him into an incestuous affair with his somewhat older aunt. I found it's themes somewhat muddled, alternating between being heavy-handedly spelled out, or so obtuse I wasn't sure what a given scene was saying. The acting in particular seems a bit all over the place; understated to the point of flatness in one scene, and then almost theatrically over the top the next. At the end I felt glad I'd seen the film, but it didn't stick with me the way Bertolucci's first film "La Commare Secca" or his third "Partner" did. ("Partner" deals with some of the same themes, but in a far more playful, often comedic way). There was a film-school sort of pretentiousness and emotional distance in "Before the Revolution that kept me from feeling moved or from being led to think deeply about the ideas. That said, I am willing to revisit it and see if my reaction changes, and certainly I enjoyed Bertolucci's already masterful use of image and sound, even if the ends he was using them to were a bit muddled.

Boba_Fett1138 No question about it that this is a well made film but is it also an interesting one? Not really in my opinion. It doesn't really tell a story and it's hard to say really what point the movie tried to make, if any.It's more a movie that focuses on its themes, rather than telling a story. It does make this movie confusing to follow at times, since you have no idea what the movie is trying to do or say at times but overall the movie remains still a fascinating one. It's an absorbing movie really, that is well made and put together by its, at the time, 22-year old director Bernardo Bertolucci.Directing-wise this movie is quite an accomplishment, especially when you're also taking into consideration that this was only Bernardo Bertolucci's second movie. The characters, the actors and some of the sequences are directed really well. Even when you don't understand or like this movie, you'll surely still notice this.Guess you could interstate this movie in different ways. You could take it as a coming of age movie, as well as a reverse coming of age movie, in which one characters wants progress and change, while the other doesn't want anything to change and actually rather go back in time. Change is really the keyword for this movie. It's filled with references to changes, while new times get welcomed and old times slowly become a thing of the past.But having said all this, the story still doesn't really make a lasting impression with anything. No real questions are asked in it, since the movie is more often too busy providing answers to things that never really got questioned in the first place. Some more focus and development of the main plot line and its characters wouldn't had harmed the movie.Not an interesting movie to watch but it can still be a fascinating one at times, as weird as this might sound.7/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

adriano-lgf I was somewhat reluctant about this film. I felt that I would be disappointed cause The Sheltering Sky (by Bertolucci) is one of my favorite movies. I though that I could never like another film by him. I was wrong. Above all, they are very different films, so let's forget one of them.I remember when I first saw Fellini's 8 ½, and realizing that one of the reasons I loved it so much was the camera work and especially what you could call as the "relative motion between objects": the way the moon always stays in the same place as the trees pass by when you drive at night. Prima della Revoluzione is rich of beautiful camera work. Bertolucci tried it all, being so young. There are smooth movements like a ballet and stressful agitated shots. I felt humbled and privileged as I saw this film. Apart from more technical aspects, the movie interested me because of the abstract, strange and poetic love story between Gina and young idealist, Fabrizio. It's hard to say if it is love, why it is or not love… Here and there you will find beautiful monologues… I think this will touch everyone who has ever wanted to change the world… even if you have already forgotten those feelings.

Gerald A. DeLuca I first saw this egregiously brilliant film by an egregiously talented young director at a private screening for members of the American Federation of Film Societies at the 34th Street East Theatre in Manhattan in 1965. I was overwhelmed by so many things in it and longed to see it again. When it opened commercially I kept going back to see it in the way fans of "Star Wars" go repeatedly to see what they love. I love it, though it often makes me as nervous and unsettled as the character of Gina in the film each time I re-see it on video.The movie is very loosely based on Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma." Parma is where the film is set, where Bertolucci is from, in the region of Giuseppe Verdi, whose music is heard in the film. At its core is a rather uncomplicated story of a young idealist, Fabrizio, who realizes his ideas will probably never be realized. He is adored by his neurotic and probably nymphomaniac aunt Gina, sent to Parma to visit family by her psychiatrist in Milan, where she lives...to have her "get away" for a while. Adriana Asti gives a dynamic performance that steals the movie from everyone else, especially from Fabrizio, who seems a boring dullard throughout, probably Bertolucci's intention, though played convincingly by Franco Barilli.The lyric elements of the movie and its persistent aural/visual poetry are what struck me the most. There is a scene at the start of the movie when Fabrizio finds out his friend has committed suicide through drowning. Fabrizio stands at the swim-hole area by some pylons and and watches in dazed iciness as a group of young boys in bathing suits make their way out of the water. Camera dissolves are accompanied by rapturous music of Ennio Morricone (one of his best scores and never issued on disc, as far as I know.) Fabrizio asks a young boy "Does it seem right to you?"...as if a pubescent kid could answer questions about life's tragedies. On every level I find that scene and those moments stunning.Many point justly to great set pieces in the movie, such as the one with the aging land-owner Puck, now on hard times, who is about to lose his heavily mortgaged estates. He begins a lament for the past (the true theme of the movie!), and just when you think he's said enough for us to understand, the scene lurches into a sudden leap, expanding and becoming utterly mad and grandiose, even haywire, as the lament continues and the camera swoops over the soon-to-be-lost-lands in a helicopter shot and as Morricone provides an operatic counterpoint and propels us all into some unspeakable dimension of regretful melancholia.Operatic the movie is, stylistically, and in a fabulous scene at the Parma Opera, quite literally. At the opening night of Verdi's "Macbeth" the various strata of Parmesan society are seen at their levels in the theatre, the bourgeoisie at the orchestra level, the aristocrats in posh side boxes, even the communist party members clustered closely in their own upper "people's box." The scene suggests the La Fenice opera scene in Visconti's "Senso." So much in the film is an homage to other directors, Godard, Rossellini, Hawks, all of whom are referred to specifically, occasionally by his film buff friend. Fabrizio's closest friend and role model is the gentle leftist teacher Cesare.By the end of the film, Gina goes back to Milan, Fabrizio loses faith in the party and marries his dull but well-positioned childhood sweetheart, Clelia. No revolution for Fabrizio. He is, with his "nostalgia for the present" condemned to live "before the revolution" as most of us are who have no appetite for revolution, only for living.The final scene has Fabrizio marrying Clelia. It is hard to believe that Bertolucci could top what has preceded it in the movie, but he does, I think. In it the brief marriage scene is inter-cut with Cesare reading to his young pupils from the "Moby Dick" story of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the while whale. As Ahab pursued the impossible, the characters of this film pursue the impossible. Gina is at the wedding, wrenched, jealous, crying. In a series of moments which Andrew Sarris referred to as "electrifying," Gina repeatedly kisses the young adolescent brother of Fabrizio. Over and over. On the face. On the head. Her young nephew. She cannot stop. She is driven, by envy, by regret. She cries. The harpsichord-enriched musical moment of Morricone underscores the Euripidean hysterics. There is a freeze-frame. A film masterpiece ends.