The Dreamers
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by Gilbert Adair
With Michael Pitt, Eva Green and Louis Garrel
Showing nationally.
REVIEW BY DANNY FAIRFAX
He: the wide-eyed young North American spending a — by now quite clich‚d — year in Paris. They: the intellectually precocious twins, native Parisians living in their artistic parents' labyrinthine apartment. The year: 1968.
After 40 years of film-making, including Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist and The Last Emperor, it is here that Bernardo Bertolucci turns full circle, with a film about politically charged youth in the 1960s that harks back to the spirit of his debut Before the Revolution, made at the age of 23.
Matthew (Michael Pitt), the faintly irritating American, meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel) at one of the key precursory demonstrations to les evennements of May '68, when a general strike joined student protests to threaten a toppling of the French state. Characteristically, the protest is against the government's sacking of the radical Henri Langlois as director of the Cinematheque Francaise (France's film institute).
Isabelle and Theo immediately take Matthew under their wing, inviting him to stay in the spare room while their parents holiday in the countryside. As in Before the Revolution, references to films being shown at the time are relentless, as the cinephiles bounce around pontificating about and enacting scenes from the work of Charlie Chaplin, Nicholas Ray and, in particular, the doyen of radical French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard (with Breathless, Band of Outsiders and La Chinoise all making an appearance). The feel of the era is further enhanced by the superb selection of music, including Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.
Soon, however, they become entangled in a web of sexual jealousy and ambiguity. The unnerving relationship between the twins rests uneasily between the sexual and the fraternal. In one of the film's more startling scenes, Isabelle loses her virginity to Matthew on the kitchen floor at the behest of Theo, who nonchalantly fries eggs a few feet away.
While in Bertolucci's debut, Fabrizzio laments that "It is always before the revolution", the action here takes place during what threatened to be an actual revolution, not that our protagonists would know it. Turning ever more insular, the gallant trio ignore the world outside of their apartment, which begins to resemble an inescapable maze of bedrooms and hallways.
It gets to the point where, making an all-too-infrequent excursion to the streets of Paris, Matthew and Isabelle are stunned to find a barricade blocking their path. Meanwhile the three continue their political pillow talk, with the contrast between Theo's militant Maoism (in theory at least) and Matthew's pacifism a persistent thorny point, until May '68 finally crashes through their window.
Disappointingly, Bertolucci subsumes the strident political nature of the era with a film centring mainly on sexual intrigue, to the extent that the setting of Paris in 1968 is largely wasted, confined to a role as background image, ambient noise. In the end, the film is probably more akin with Last Tango in Paris than anything else in Bertolucci's oeuvre.
It is nevertheless one of the most politically stimulating films screening at present, and makes an interesting companion to Denys Arcand's Barbarian Invasions, another film about progressive Francophonic baby-boomers, but set in the present-day. What is perhaps most lamentable is that these films are being made by the old guard of directors, and have inherent to them a certain patronising attitude to the idea of youthful rebellion. What is really needed is a political film culture of today's young people.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 19, 2004.
Visit the