The themes that dominate all of Bertolucci's subsequent films -
communism, incest, cinephilia - made their first appearance in this,
his second feature. At the time the young director was giving
interviews in French, and Before The Revolution is as nouvelle as they
come. The protagonist's film-buff mate speaks in Godardian aphorisms
- "style is a moral fact" being one of the most pleasing. Yet
in its sensitivity to the psychology of political commitment the film
anticipates the ideological struggles of the late 1960s. Its divided
anti-hero, stuck between bourgeois conformity and socialist
rebellion, was to become a Bertolucci archetype.
