La Commare Secca, [which has been translated as The Grim Reaper but] which means literally "The Dry Housewife" or "Housewife Dry" is a Roman-dialect name for death, and Bernardo Bertolucci's film is basically a treatment of death and of processes and conditions which are a part of its nature: solitude, inevitability, ritual…. Compared to Before the Revolution, La Commare Secca tries for much less and comes off much better at it, Bertolucci's weaknesses being more evident in the later film.

A weakness which doesn't have to be one at all in the future unless Bertolucci insists on it is simply that, judging by Before the Revolution and despite the fact that Bertolucci has written and perhaps still writes poetry, he does not seem to be a good writer. Most of the writing in that film is in a very banal Italian tradition of regional sentimentalism and would-be-elegant sentence-making...