Having paid his debt to Pasolini and measured his own strengths on the field of his parent Attilio (in 1962 Bertolucci won the Viareggio Prize, Opera Prima section, with the collection of poems In cerca del mistero), the author now seems free to fly and create independently. Before the Revolution is a thoughtful work and at the same time the fiery confession of a lay heretic. The plot flows in three directions – erotic, ideological and psychic – which seem different but are closely combined, and involves five main characters, three of which are openly of literary derivation: Fabrizio, Gina and Clelia are in fact characters from Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. The other two, his friend Agostino and his mentor Cesare, masterfully exemplify the dilemma that constitutes the essence of Fabrizio’s psychology, namely the tension between lightness and rigor, poetry and political commitment, aestheticism and pragmatism, art and life, dream and reality. In Parma, the young Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) has a relationship with Gina (Adriana Asti), his mother’s sister, but marries the conventional and sweet Clelia (Cristina Pariset). In this dense and touching work, one of the best produced by our cinema during the Sixties, autobiography merges with current political and social events: the result is a highly original document dedicated to a silent and tormented historical period. If Talleyrand’s initial quote explains that one cannot understand the sweetness of life if one has not lived in the years before the revolution, if Clelia is the sweetness of life that Fabrizio does not want to accept, the Oedipal protagonist, also a new Hamlet, although bored and impetuous, tends to delay existential choices. Between the soft and sacred beauty of Clelia, and the dry awareness of Cesare (Morando Morandini), he ultimately chooses or, rather, slips into the former, symbol and silent banner of his social class. A choice motivated by a famous joke: "While I live I already feel the moments I am living are very far away, so I don't want to change the present, I take it as it comes. But my bourgeois future is in my bourgeois past. So for me ideology was a vacation, a holiday. (...) I thought I was living the years of the revolution and instead I was living the years before the revolution, because it is always before the revolution when you are like me."
