Review #625: 'Before the Revolution' (1964)

After his début, The Grim Reaper (1962), the then 22-year old Bernardo Bertolucci made this, Before the Revolution, an often astonishing homage to the ongoing French New Wave movement and a work of almost unbelievable maturity given his age. Set very much after the revolution, presumably referring to the Italian unification, this is undoubtedly a bleak film, looking back on Italy's history with blind, fond nostalgia, and staring into the abyss of their future. Despite the occasional Marxist monologue, the film is in no ways political, and instead focuses on very human drama, with characters seemingly locked into their social roles and resigned to their fate.

The handsome and idealistic Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) is destined to marry his childhood sweetheart Clelia (Cristina Pariset), a beautiful woman teetering on aristocracy. After his friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) drowns in a possible suicide, he falls headlong into a potentially dangerous love affair with his aunt Gina (Adriana Asti). Gina is unpredictable, highly emotional and possibly borderline mentally ill, but she is also attractive, seductive and wilful, challenging for the sullen Fabrizio. The death of Agostino clearly damages the passionate Fabrizio, whose studies of Marxism with his teacher and friend Cesare (Morando Morandini) had made him outspoken, but now finds himself blindly wandering into the bourgeoisie.

The film doesn't really have a plot as such, but is instead a collection of scenes and interplays that channel Bertolucci's somewhat pessimistic views of Italy in the 1960's. The characters seem locked in the past, a past that they weren't alive for, and as Fabrizio states, full of nostalgia for the present, as if every passing moment is somehow being snatched away from them. It's best summarised in what is undoubtedly the stand-out scene in the movie, as they visit Puck (Cecrope Barilli), a man crippled with so much debt that he is soon to lose his beloved land. While the camera stays calm and graceful throughout the film, Puck laments as the camera sweeps into their air over rivers and forests, Ennio Morricone's astounding score blaring over the visuals. It's a beautiful moment, full of sad longing that reminded me of Sam the Lion's moving monologue in The Last Picture Show (1971) - one of favourite moments in cinema.

Although this is clearly a wink to Godard and the French New Wave, Bertolucci takes a much more controlled approach to the direction. The camera often glides slowly from side to side, switching character focus as they talk, filmed in crisp black-and-white. It was this approach that caused Godard to voice his displeasure at Bertolucci after viewing his masterpiece The Conformist (1970), claiming it to be too contrived. But cinema can be anything and everything you want it to be, and this makes for beautiful cinema, anchored by a powerful performance by Asti, who makes any possible taboo regarding her incestuous relationship with her nephew become redundant. This is much more than a simple love story, this is a film about a country, it's past and present.


Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
Starring: Adriana Asti, Francesco Barilli, Morando Morandini
Country: Italy

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #115: 'The Phantom of Liberty' (1974)

Luis Bunuel's penultimate film focuses on the uncertainty of chance, as well as blending his own experiences and dreams with his surrealistic ideals. The majority of the focus centres around a hotel where a collection of bizarre characters interact and cross path to strange and sometimes hilarious outcomes. Some of the key scenes involve a sniper picking off random people from a tower window only to be congratulated for his acts, a dinner party where the group gather in the toilet for discussion and excuse themselves to eat on their own in the dining room, and a couple set up a search party for their 'missing' daughter who is with them the whole time (even helping fill out her own missing persons form).

As mentioned, The Phantom Of Liberty is all about the importance of chance and the inevitability of fate. The characters exist or meet under unusual circumstances, and seem to be just go through the motions, resigned to their existence. It is also a mockery of social order, and how this collection vast array of different characters - monks, the police, the military, teachers, sexual deviants, the bourgeois, doctors - all seem to clash because of the place society has dictated they are to be. This is usually to great comic effect, and sometimes to a slightly tragic one. Mainly this is the case in a scene where a doctor hesitates to tell his patient that he is dying from cancer, and eventually tells him matter-of-factly in an almost humorous way. This scene was based on Bunuel's own experiences of being told he has a liver disorder, which he tragically died from in 1983.

Bunuel's films are usually very funny, but not in the laugh-out-loud way. He usually pokes fun at the bourgeois in a cunning manner, and sets up bizarre scenes of surrealism (to the greatest effect in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972), which in my opinion is his finest film). But he seems to be at his most free-spirited here, and the funniest moment has to be when a couple hosting a group of monks in their hotel room begin to change their clothes - the women puts on a leather dominatrix outfit, and the man reveals he is wearing arse-less pants - and commence a spanking ritual much to the monks utter horror.

It may be the funniest, but it's also Bunuel's least accessible film. Obviously Bunuel was less concerned with making it easy for the audience than to express himself artistically, but I found this a hard film to completely connect with, similar to the way I felt with Peter Greenaway's A Zed And Two Noughts (1986). Some scenes I felt didn't work - especially the scene where the couple is searching for their missing daughter. They interact with her, and the police even interview her to get a physical description. It is quite a long scene, and the joke wears thin pretty fast. That said, it's certainly one of Bunuel's more interesting films, but doesn't quite match up to his best work.


Directed by: Luis Buñuel
Starring: Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy
Country: Italy/France

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie