Aunt Gina (Adriana Asti) and Fabrizo (Francesco Barilli)

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Starring Adriana Asti, Francesco Barilli Club, IFI, Dublin, 112 min irishfilm.ie

In an era when rebellious young film-makers define their work with mumbling and disassociation, the 1960s fervour of their politicised predecessors looks increasingly archaic. Fabrizio, the callow youthful hero of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution is a case in point.

Like most of his contemporary firebrands, the more Fabrizo pontificates and expands around the tenets of Marx and Freud, the more inclined we are to see him as a pompous closet member of the bourgeoisie. He may talk a good game, but it’s difficult to determine just how this tortured poetic soul fits in with the historic struggles of the working masses.

Brooding around the streets of Parma, Fabrizo pines after Gina, his neurotic, voluptuous aunt lately arrived from fashionable Milan. Yet he simultaneously cultivates a romance with a pious, safe-bet sweetheart. Even before the revolution, Fabrizio is down with the status quo.

“Life is not order,” Gina advises. “You’re out of step with history,” snaps back her wannabe Communist swain.

For most of the 1960s, Bertolucci was an Italian one- man band marching along to the beats of the French Nouvelle Vague. Before the Revolution (1964), Bertolucci’s sophomore effort as a director, was made when he was 22 and still bewitched by the medium.

Bertolucci’s admiration for his Gallic peers translates into unabashed homage. A famously lengthy sequence featuring Adriana Asti’s Gina in granny glasses and a bob is how Jules et Jim might look in Scary Movie 5. The film geek chatter might have been transcribed

by a displaced Tarantino: “I remember the 360 degree dolly shot of Nicholas Ray,” sighs one of Fabrizio’s cineaste chums, “I swear, one of the highest moral facts in the history of cinema.”

Painfully earnest and artistically lopsided, Before the Revolution is nobody’s idea of the highest moral fact in cinema. It is, however, recognisably the work of the same director who made The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem. Watch closely and there are shots and snatches of Bertolucci the master alongside pretentious pointers to the architect of Stealing Beauty. A fascinating historical document.