Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) is a key to the director's later work. Many of the themes developed in Bertolucci's mature films, including Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, and 1900 are evident in the director's first feature film. The movie is heavily influenced by Godard and the French filmmaker's rather cubist style of editing dominates the movie -- sequences are divided up into discontinuous shots, often with disconcerting jump cuts and mismatched edits; the film is not cut to serve its narrative, but, rather, broken into images spliced together in a stuttering, fragmentary montage. The soundtrack frequently doesn't match the imagery and there are jokey musical cues, that sometimes resemble the Godard-influenced work of Richard Lester in his Beatles films. The music for Before the Revolution was composed by Ennio Morricone and is well worth attending to. In fact, musical themes predominate in the movie -- there is a lot of harpsichord on the soundtrack and a penultimate sequence involves a performance of Verdi's opera version of Macbeth. Much of the film, made in black and white, looks like a jerky, covertly filmed documentary -- there is a cinema verite aspect to the picture's rough edges and, in fact, cinema verite as a film style is mentioned in one sequence. These elements of the film undercut Bertolucci's rapturous eye for landscape and the epic dimensions of his movie-making -- in his later pictures, as with the spaghetti westerns on which he actually worked (he was an assistant director on Sergio Leone's Once upon a time in the West) everything looks larger-than-life, exaggerated for baroque effects and there's a dreamy, swooning aspect to his mise-en-scene. The languorous and ecstatic aspects of Bertolucci's mature films are not really visible in Before the Revolution except for a spectacular sequences involving a drowning at a picturesquely barren construction site. That scene is one of the rare sequences in Before the Revolution in which we can detect Bertolucci's big-budget style -- obvious in films like La Luna, The Last Emperor, The Conformist and the enormous arthouse spaghetti Western qua Marxist pageant of 1900. It's not so much the imagery in Before the Revolution that prefigures Bertolucci's later themes and obsessions, but the subject matter that comprises the movie.
There's a lot of talk in Before the Revolution, much of it poetic or allusive. Various literary works are cited. The film comes with several epigraphs including a citation from Talleyrand which says something to the effect that no one can appreciate the sweetness of life "before the revolution" who did not live in those days. The idea seems to be that the revolution is best appreciated before it is attempted and before the enterprise devolves into internecine fighting and disenchantment. Something similar, I think, is suggested about love. The anticipation of love is better than the rather messy and inevitably disappointing erotic encounter itself. In this way, eros and revolution are linked, a concern that runs like scarlet thread through the entirety of the film. The movie is about young people fumbling their way through their first love affairs -- therefore, the subject of the picture is lust, erotic betrayal and disenchantment, these latter qualities also defining the characters' flirtation with Communism.
The movie's narrative eschews standard establishing shots or linear chronology (and there are elisions in which key events are not shown to us) and, so, the summary of events in the movie that I now provide is an approximation or estimate (guess) as to what happens in the picture. A handsome young man named Fabrizio is flirting with another boy named Agostino. Agostino, who is a blonde waif, is estranged from his family and may be homosexual. By contrast, Fabrizio seems, more or less, heterosexual, although, perhaps, a bit bi curious, and, although he espouses Marxist Communism, he lives very happily with his upper middle class bourgeois family in Parma. Fabrizio wants Agostino to join the Party and meet his friend, a high school teacher named Cesare. Fabrizio mocks Agostino's family and says his father is a thief. Agostino, who is riding a bike in circles around his friend, seems hurt and repeatedly crashes the bike, injuring himself in a masochistic display of affection for Fabrizio. Later, we discover that Agostino has drowned himself at a place where some sort of huge bridge is being built over the Po River swamps; his body has been found in a deep spot in some murky-looking mud flats next to a pier or bridge piling. (This scene is shot very elliptically. It begins with clothing on the river bank, then, scenes of naked boys flouncing around in the water, and, then, shows someone trying to load a bike into a small car -- the clothes and the bike belong to the deceased Agostino and people are removing his remains from the scene of his death.) It isn't clear whether Agostino's death was an accident or suicide.
At the funeral for Agostino, Fabrizio encounters a beautiful young woman, Gina (played by Adriana Asti). This woman, strangely enough, is Fabrizio's aunt -- exactly how this relationship is configured was unclear to me. Gina seems interested in Fabrizio and she goes shopping with him in a slapstick scene like something from a Monkees' TV episode -- its eccentrically filmed for whimsy. The two meet under Garibaldi's statue in Milan where Gina lives. (They keep just missing one another in another whimsical sequence that will be either charming or infuriating to viewers depending upon your inclinations.) Gina comes to visit Fabrizio's family who live in a beautiful villa in Parma. It's Easter holiday and the two sneak off into a ruinous print shop to have sex. Almost immediately, Gina feels confined and trapped by the relationship. She goes shopping for newspapers and buys about twenty of them. The man who sold the papers to her pursues her down the street -- they have exchanged seductive glances at the news-stand -- and he is about to usher her into a no-tell motel when Fabrizio shows up, understandably miffed at Gina's betrayal. As with Agostino, Fabrizio desires that Gina join the Communist Party and meet with his mentor and friend, Cesare. Ultimately, Gina does meet Cesare at a rather tortured encounter in the teacher's book-filled apartment. It's pretty clear that Gina will likely try to seduce Cesare and have an affair with him and the older man doesn't seem inclined to rebuff her advances. Gina calls someone in Milan and complains about being confined in Parma in the home of Fabrizio's parents. (She seems to be talking to a married lover.) Gina and Fabrizio have a quarrel and, later, we see Cesare carrying Gina's luggage across wet and windy Milan to the train-station where she departs for places unknown. This sequence is preceded by an open-air scene along the river Po involving a painter, an older man (who also seems to be enamored with Gina), Cesare, and Fabrizio -- the older man bids farewell to the river in a poetic scene which seems to suggest that Nature is being destroyed in the service of modern technology and commerce. When Fabrizio denounces the older man, apparently one of Gina's lovers, she becomes enraged and repeatedly slaps him across the face. Time lapses after Gina leaves Milan. Fabrizio attends a Communist-sponsored May Day festival in Milan but is disappointed by the comrades that he meets. He realizes that its hard enough to influence one person, probably based on his experience with Gina, let alone the laboring masses of the world. The sequence ends with a parade, banners, and Cesare with Fabrizio reciting by heart parts of Marx's Communist Manifesto. Later, Fabrizio attends a performance of Verdi's Macbeth sitting in a posh balcony suite with his new fiancee and her well-heeled family -- she is a gorgeous but dumb blonde. Gina shows up at the opera, characteristically late, but makes a grand entrance. She's heard that her nephew is going to marry the blonde. The two meet in the empty lobby after both of them slip out of their seats. Gina would like to disrupt the engagement just for the sheer hell of it, apparently, but they are both too wary of one another to re-invent their love affair. In the last scene, Fabrizio marries the blonde. Gina is in attendance. She approaches Fabrizio's younger brother, who is a carbon copy of the hero, and showers him with caresses and kisses.
This is what I think happens in the movie. I've left out an amusing scene in which Fabrizio, unhappy with Gina's tendency to indulge herself with other men, goes to the cinema and sees Godard's A Woman is a Woman. After the movie, he has a conversation with a cinephile and they discuss the morality of film style. The cinephile says that life isn't possible without Rossellini. There's an ambiguous sexual sub-current to the scene, again suggesting that Fabrizio, if not gay himself, exudes gay vibes sufficient to attract homosexual men and the cinephile seems to be trying to seduce Fabrizio. This sequence is just a divertimento, a subplot that goes nowhere. It's similar to a scene that we see later in which Cesare, an anti-Fascist, reads an soliloquy by Captain Ahab to his bemused eight and nine-year old students. This is a striking sequence but, also, goes nowhere. There's an overtly anti-clerical scene at the start of the film in which Fabrizio searches through the churches in Milan (or is it Parma?) for his pious girlfriend, someone named Cleia -- he never finds her and the scene seems to be to be designed primarily for provocation; Bertolucci has his hero say some nasty things about Italian Catholicism.
I have said that Before the Revolution is a sort of skeleton key to themes in later Bertolucci films. Fabrizio's ambiguous sexuality invokes similar themes in The Conformist. The perils associated with sex involving little bourgeois girls reminds us that Marlon Brando, a figure portrayed like Odysseus in Last Tango in Paris is killed on the basis of his entanglement with such a person. The Communist festival that features rather pathetically in the fourth act of Before the Revolution prefigures the grandiose fantasy May Day celebration that concludes 1900, another film that expands to embrace all of the main themes explored by Bertolucci in his mature films. The incestuous relationship between aunt and nephew becomes full-blown mother-son incest in La Luna, a movie that also concludes with a performance of a Verdi opera, in this case The Masked Ball (Un ballo en maschera) -- Bertolucci's interest in Verdi is further highlighted in 1900 which begins with a village idiot, dressed as Rigoletto, proclaiming that Verdi has died. The misty waterlogged landscapes of the Po River delta seem sketches based on the last episode in Rossellini's Paisan and point forward to the great march of the workers along the river banks in 1900. Bertolucci's fundamental point in Before the Revolution is that sex and politics are endeavors that involve, inevitably, betrayal and disappointment. One of his great films, The Last Emperor is an epic in reverse -- it might be called "After the Revolution", a movie about the last emperor of China, relentlessly damaged by both sexual entanglements and the Maoist revolution. Sex and politics are abiding obsessions in human life but as demonstrated both in Before the Revolution and The Last Emperor, hope is better than consummation and, in fact, wisdom requires resignation, a stoic response to the disenchantment that comes with age. Although wonderfully assured, Before the Revolution is an apprentice work by a great director -- but, like everything by Bertolucci, it is well worth watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment