It's always just “before the revolution” if you give in to the stasis of bourgeois life. But this is also a paradoxical state for the exuberant youth at the center of Bertolucci's paean to unhinged passion-a state of kept innocence vying with radical impulse. And Bertolucci should know, having been a mere twenty-three years old when he created this brilliant New Wave amalgam that references Stendhal, Godard, Marx, Talleyrand, Rossellini, Chekhov, and others. A young man of haut-bourgeois origin, Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli) nonetheless fancies himself a progressive thinker. His is a shaky idealism, enflamed by the committed words of his Marxist mentor. Then Fabrizio begins an affair with his seductive and unsettled aunt Gina (played with torrid assurance by Adriana Asti). Neither of the conflicting poles of Bertolucci's audacious narrative-the complicated emotions of the amorous aunt, or the exhilaration of proletarian resistance-can offer Fabrizio the safety he requires. A “nostalgia for the present” afflicts this timorous youth, while all around him, things change.