Bertolucci’s second feature is a personal work affirming—overtly and by implication—the centrality of cinema in his life. It is more autobiographical still in catching the leftist ideology of the 1960s to which restless Italian youth was increasingly drawn. Here, post-university, middle-class Franco Barilli gravitates towards Marxism while straying from bourgeois fiancée Cristina Pariset into an escalating affair with aunt Adriana Asti (Bertolucci’s real-life first wife).

In Italian with English subtitles