Bertolucci was only 22 years old when he made PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE. It uses black and white as if they were the first colours of the world to tell this story of forbidden love and passionate political confusion. The main character Fabrizio(the names of nephew and aunt are taken from Stendhal’s CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA) is a son of a middle class family about to marry a girl his own age and enter into respectability. He isn’t very sympathetic or likable but that’s Bertolucci’s intent, and that doesn’t make his pain and romanticism less potent. He is a Marxist or hopes to be one and is obsessed with the idea of “revolution” and the film examines this obsession critically, but sympathetically showing the double edge of how the yearning for change can end up causing a “nostalgia for the present”.