italy

Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (Director: Bernardo Bertolucci): Bertolucci’s second fea­ture, and the first written by the dir­ector, is bound to be a bit more auto­bi­o­graph­ical than La com­mare secca’s explor­a­tion of the Italian under­class. Even though it’s loosely based on Stendhal’s novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the dir­ector, just 23 when he made the film, surely drew upon some con­flicted feel­ings about his own upbringing. Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is a child of priv­ilege who’s been under the tutelage of a Communist teacher. He yearns to escape his bour­geois fate, and so dumps his gor­geous but simple girl­friend Clelia (the stun­ning Cristina Pariset) to pursue revolu­tion in a more monk­like fashion. Enter his young Aunt Gina (Adriana Asti), a neur­otic and con­fused beauty who has come from Milan to stay with her sister’s family in Parma. At first Fabrizio is dis­tracted by the sui­cide of his unhappy (and quite prob­ably gay) friend Agostino, a young man he was trying to tutor polit­ic­ally. His reac­tion is more one of dis­ap­point­ment than of grief, but it plants a seed that maybe his polit­ical act­ivism isn’t the solu­tion to all of life’s problems.

The emotionally-needy Gina, mean­while, has become obsessed with her nephew and before long they fall into a pas­sionate affair. This for­bidden tryst is some­what of a polit­ical act for Fabrizio, but for the self-loathing older woman, it’s an act of des­per­a­tion. For all the dazz­ingly stylish images Bertolucci frames for us, he can’t make these two self-absorbed people very sym­path­etic char­ac­ters, and I found my patience tested more than once with some of the bom­bastic speechifying.

Strangely enough, it’s a scene almost entirely divorced from the nar­rative up to that point that brought me back into the film. Gina goes to visit an aris­to­cratic man a little bit older than her­self, whom she calls “Puck.” For some unex­plained reason, Fabrizio and his Communist mentor Cesare show up a little while later. Puck’s mono­logue about his own lack of pur­pose as a child of the bour­geoisie is unex­pec­tedly poignant, espe­cially for a char­acter we’ve just met. As he stands on the riverbank looking out over the unspoiled wil­der­ness of his estate, he explains to the group that all his land is mort­gaged and that he is about to lose everything. Businessmen will buy the land up and develop it, erasing its pas­toral serenity. He real­izes his own use­less­ness as a member of society, never having earned a degree or learned a trade. Fabrizio upbraids him for his “false sin­cerity” but after Gina slaps his face, he begins to recog­nize him­self in the older man. There is no escape for the chil­dren of the bourgeoisie.

Despite the rel­at­ively narrow gap in their ages, Gina and Fabrizio are def­in­itely on two sides of a gen­er­a­tional divide. For the young man, he wants to change the present, to change him­self in an attempt to escape his fate, and to change the world by imposing the order he sees in a set of dog­matic polit­ical prin­ciples. Gina, on the other hand (and “Puck” as well) des­per­ately wants to hold onto the present. She has already felt the pas­sage of time and the dis­order of the real world and feels help­less in the face of the future.

Bertolucci uses a mish­mash of styles throughout, bor­rowing espe­cially from the French New Wave dir­ectors. There’s even a scene where Fabrizio goes to see Godard’s A Woman is a Woman, get­ting into a half-hearted argu­ment with a boorish cinephile after­wards. Just as in Godard’s work, I found some of the jump-cutting made the nar­rative dis­jointed in spots. And I found a few of the later scenes went on far too long. But just as often I found the cam­er­a­work dazzling, and some scenes were just a pure pleasure to watch: a scene of Fabrizio and Gina shop­ping, for example, or the dance scene which you can watch in the clip below. As for the per­form­ances, the film belongs com­pletely to Adriana Asti as Gina. Despite my ref­er­ence to the “stun­ning” Cristina Pariset above, it’s Asti you can’t take your eyes off, even as her neur­otic mood swings make her char­acter unlike­able. By con­trast, Francesco Barilli is just a petu­lant rich boy. Though he’s ostens­ibly the prot­ag­onist, it’s Gina’s char­acter whose con­flicts remain most vis­ibly unresolved.

Kevin Lee’s excel­lent review and roundup of crit­ical opin­ions on the film is unsur­passed if you want to go deeper.

(8/10)

Tagged as: bertolucci, italy, lightbox

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From January 6th-19th, TIFF Bell Lightbox is presenting a ret­ro­spective of the work of Bernardo Bertolucci, a dir­ector whose work has always hovered around the peri­phery of my vision. I’m looking for­ward to cor­recting that over­sight. His film­making career has spanned 50 years and although he began working in a vaguely neor­ealist style, he quickly moved on to exper­i­ment with many other styles and a diversity of sub­ject matter. The TIFF pro­gram guide has clev­erly singled out his ever-present themes of “sex, politics and visual splendour” with a slightly naughty allit­er­ative tagline: Fashion, Fascists and Fucking (or F**king, if you’re sensitive).

Although the Lightbox will be a grand venue to watch (or revisit) some of his most well-known films (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor), the real oppor­tunity is to see some of his lesser-known work. In par­tic­ular, I’m looking for­ward to Before the Revolution (1964) and Partner (1968), two form­ative works from the tur­bu­lent 60s which led up to his break­through film The Conformist in 1970.

Leaving aside the Fashion (“visual splendour”) side of the tri­angle for a moment, I’m fas­cin­ated by Bertolucci’s mix­ture of sen­su­ality and polit­ical frus­tra­tion. While the 60s seem to be the decade most asso­ci­ated with sexual lib­er­a­tion and polit­ical struggle, the dir­ector has made almost all of his films about indi­viduals strug­gling against larger forces and using sex as both a res­pite from the struggle and an act of per­sonal defi­ance. I’m intrigued by TIFF pro­grammer Jesse Wente’s obser­va­tion that “Bertolucci con­tinues to identify sex as a pro­foundly lib­er­ating force, a pure human freedom that defies the stric­tures and con­ven­tions of society.” I’m cer­tain that approaching the films with at least this state­ment in mind is going to help me appre­ciate Bertolucci’s sig­ni­fic­ance as a unique voice in world cinema.

Tickets can be pur­chased online for any of the films in the series. Here are a few images to whet your appetite:

Tagged as: bertolucci, italy, lightbox

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