[If Before the Revolution is] a failure, it's a beautiful one; far more exciting than some of the easy successes we applaud and forget each year. [It's often] incoherent, terrifyingly immature, fascinatingly beautiful…. [It] has all the faults you'd expect from a very young director, and all the intensity you'd expect from youth. Before the end it falls to pieces, but how lovely the fragments!

Despite some critical opinion to the contrary, I don't think it's at all a film about the boredom and decay of the middle classes, the alienation of Western man, or anything else that will fit some critical pigeonhole. Like most films, it's "about" the people in it. Its theme is hyperintellectualism, the tendency of many bright young people to make ideas a substitute for feelings…. Fabrizio's ideas about the world prove inadequate to his understanding of it, for understanding demands the emotional involvement...