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of respectability. Inspired by Cesare, who acts as his political mentor, Fabrizio embraces
leftist politics, and breaks up with Clelia in his desire to reject the social status quo.
Fascinated by Gina - his mothers emancipated younger sister who lives in Milan - the two
become intimate, but the rapport is conditioned by Gina's awareness that it has no future.
Fabrizio shows insensitivity towards his best friend Agostino, who is uncomfortable with the
materialism of his parents, and has difficulty in adjusting to a lifestyle split between the
modem cosmopolitanism of Switzerland and Parma's provincialism. The news that Agostino
has drowned hits Fabrizio, because it is suspected to be suicide, and also Gina, as it
exacerbates her neurosis and solitude. The poetic goodbye that Gina's friend Puck addresses
to the family estate he can no longer afford comes to represent a metaphorical form of closure
for Gina who returns to Milan, and for Fabrizio who realizes that his bourgeois destiny is
inescapable. During a Communist Party festival, Fabrizio declares his disillusionment and
sense of failure to Cesare, who instead reaffirms his political credo. The film's ending shows
how all three main characters settle for unfulfilling existential compromises. Cesare takes the
soft option of teaching in a school, since he thinks that revolutionary ideals are likelier to
germinate within children. Fabrizio marries Clelia as an act of individual resignation and
failure, whereas Gina's tears during the wedding reveal her unhappiness.
Political disillusionment, pessimism and melancholy
The film s first images are accompanied by Fabrizio reciting in voiceover Pasolini's poem La
religione del mio tempo, which immediately establishes the intellectual remit of Before the
Revolution and its pessimistic mood, the poem criticizing Italian society and accusing
Catholicism of accepting and perpetuating socio-economic injustice, and of being the
merciless heart of the State itself.(2) By the early 1960s, the hopes of Italy's progressive
political parties, such as the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), for a better and fairer world
had receded, having been dashed by defeat in the 1948 general election which saw the
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