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Before the Revolution

Italy is the place where they've made an art of everything - especially love!

1964 · 1h 55m · N/A Drama, Romance
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

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Overview

The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino's funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina's older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy's future. Their own futures are bleak.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
93%
Tomatometer
Fresh

Here is a new talent of outstanding promise.

Eugene Archer, New York Times
Fresh

The contrary attractions of sensuality and politics have been the subject of many of Bertolucci's films, but the conflict is presented most passionately and personally here.

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
Fresh

In all of Bertolucci's movies, there's a central conflict between the 'radical' impulses and a pessimistic (and/or willing) capitulation to the mainstream of bourgeois society and culture.

Time Out

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