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(Prima della rivoluzione) Bernardo Bertolucci, Director, 1962. By Keith Breese Bertolucci's artistic 'piece de resistance', Before The Revolution, is an intangible and anti-narrative experiment in film cohesion. The film progresses seamlessly towards an enigmatic conclusion, while charging indoctrination with corruption and utilizing propaganda as style. Bertolucci responds to dogma by replacing media with medium. Textually the signified here becomes the signified. Characters in the film are meaningless, and vacant icons; they become the images (the shadows on the wall) that they 'act' upon. However, this style and deconstructionist meta-theatricality make the film unabsorbable. Where Pasolini's intention of creating an un-consumable film worked in Salo, Bertolucci's Before The Revolution spreads itself too far and too thinly. The plot revolves around Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), a melancholy man in a disintegrating world, who, after the death of his friend Agostino (Allen Midgette), falls in love with the esoteric Gina (Adriana Asti), his aunt. Love blossoms between the two, then fails in a final act of desperation. The film covers many themes, from alienation to sex, from cinematic history to understanding. Collage-like in structure, the film begins with a premise of monumental grandeur, shot in striking B&W and magnificently filmed by Aldo Scavarda (who filmed the earlier L'avventura of Michelangelo Antonioni), the film exudes an artistic quality that attempts poetic lyricism. Via repetitious zooms, and varying editing, the viewer is dislocated from the 'light-show' and is deadened by the phlegmatic momentum. (A momentum that is so overbearing the film almost becomes parodic.) As Fabrizio meanders through city-scapes, falling in and out of love with Gina and endlessly searching for an existential meaning, his encounters with political forces are too conspicuous and diverting. The viewer simply cannot care for both Fabrizio's search and the heavy-handing statements about 'thought-control'. While we, the consumers, become so easily pleased with the sugar-coated beauty of the film, its caustic message is lost. |