First tango

Bertolucci's Before the Revolution

These days, Bernardo Bertolucci, the Last Tango filmmaker, is regarded as a dried-up talent who in middle age has long since lost his way. The Last Emperor (1987), an Oscar winner, is the shining exception to two decades of misguided projects: Luna (1979), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1994), Stealing Beauty (1996), and Besieged (1998).

I try to stay open to Bertolucci, who on the several occasions I talked to him impressed me as such a cultivated, curious, principled man. I think Jill Clayburgh was wonderfully sensual in Luna, and The Sheltering Sky was a noble effort to adapt the difficult Paul Bowles novel. Okay, Keanu Reeves wasn't ideal for a flashback Siddhartha, but Little Buddha proved visually arresting in its Seattle scenes, evergreen and gray fog. Stealing Beauty? Thin going, yet Liv Tyler was discovered here.

Now Bertolucci is back on track, though in a deliberately modest way. Besieged, his current David Thewlis-starring film, is just an all-around decent, intelligent movie, with the oft-epic filmmaker as a miniaturist offering the equivalent of a quiet, subtly epiphanic short story.

Still, there's no getting around the fact that Bertolucci's glory days were long ago. Through the '60s and '70s he was among the most audacious voices of world cinema, a one-person Italian New Wave. The Coolidge Corner's Bertolucci series, Wednesdays at 7:30 in August, includes his three early causes célèbres (for these, Pauline Kael in the New Yorker was his most articulate cheerleader): Before the Revolution (1964; August 4), The Conformist (1971; August 11), and Last Tango in Paris (1972; August 18). There's also The Last Emperor (August 25).

The rarely revived one, a must for Bertolucci aficionados, is Before the Revolution, made in widescreen black-and-white when he was an extraordinarily precocious 23. It's autobiographical: Fabrizio (furrow-browed Francesco Barilli) is, like the youthful filmmaker, girl-and-movie crazy and Marx-and-Freud obsessed, a tie-and-coat high bourgeois trying to be a renegade and relate to the historic struggles of the masses. He lives in the provincial city of Parma (where Bertolucci was born) and has a torrid affair with Gina (Adriana Asti), his attractive young aunt from hip Milan, even as he's drawn to the conventional, churchgoing, pretty younger thing Clelia (Cristina Pariset).

Although Fabrizio orders a suicide-prone friend to a screening of Hawks's Red River and he himself takes a quick break to see Godard's A Woman Is a Woman, mostly he is too stressed and distracted by love and political concerns to benefit from filmgoing. So Bertolucci provides him with a hilarious cinephile friend who spends his whole sentient life at the altar of movies (he sees them twice in a row). Afterward, he smokes and philosophizes about them. "I remember the 360-degree dolly shot of Nicholas Ray, I swear, one of the highest moral facts in the history of cinema," this friend says, and, "Remember, one can't live without Rossellini!"

Bertolucci the film geek is stamped all over the shooting: Before the Revolution is a perpetual homage to his cinema masters, old and new. Gina alienated in fashionable clothes and photographed against architecture comes from Antonioni; Gina in a telephone monologue from Rossellini; Gina framed formally with bare legs from Godard; Gina making faces in granny glasses from Truffaut. (It's interesting to see Bertolucci in 1963 quoting A Woman Is a Woman and Truffaut's Jules and Jim, both from 1961, as if they were already canonic texts.)

Bertolucci's other source: Stendhal's early-19th-century novel The Charterhouse of Parma. Thank you, Bernardo, for affording me an excuse to spend several long plane rides reading Stendhal's fabulous 500-page Machiavellian melodrama about the post-Napoleon political maneuverings in the city of Parma. What does it have to do with Before the Revolution? The names of the three main characters are the same -- Fabrizio, Gina, and Clelia -- and in both cases Fabrizio bypasses the love of his flashy aunt for that of a pious, straitlaced younger girl. And there's stifling Parma, and there's a common setting for high drama in the opera.

But the contrasts are far more telling. Stendhal's Gina is the most conniving belle at court, almost as obsessed by power and riches as she is by her conquering of Fabrizio. Bertolucci's Gina is a little lost rich girl, panicked and neurotic, a walking nervous breakdown with no aspiration except getting men to love her. (At times she's a drag, and her multi-moods are the most tiresome part of the movie.)

Stendhal's Fabrizio is a soldier (he fights at Waterloo), an adventurer, a nobleman, an autocrat, a political opportunist with little on his conscience. Bertolucci's Fabrizio is a man of acute self-consciousness who's pained by his political ineffectuality (that of the bourgeois class) and agonized by the possibility that the promised Marxist paradise will never come. "It's always before the revolution," he says, on a May Day of unfurled red flags in Parma, practically bawling.