The Dreamers
by Mark Netter

It is a widely accepted fact that movies featuring excessive violence are less likely to earn an NC-17 (Adults Only) rating from the Motion Picture Association of America than movies featuring graphic sexuality. Four year-old children are being allowed in with their parents to watch a guy in sandals being brutalized to death, but there are no sixteen year-olds allowed in to watch the exchange and, in fairness, smearing of bodily fluids in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers .

While that particular ratings board system outrage has been going on for some time, what is less discussed is how typical it is to find frankly sexual films dismissed by even committed filmgoers, a dismissal frequently accompanied by a kind of adolescent humor. A violent film may turn us off but it won't get goofed on the same way that a sexual film will, maybe because graphic violence is always a serious matter, doing serious damage, an attack on the audience as much as the characters. Or maybe we Americans are just a little bit arrested in our development.

Whatever the reason, Bertolucci's often addle-headed bourgeois kids provide plenty of ammunition for said dismissal, but it would be a shame. The provocations of The Dreamers are not questions of blood libel; they are more generous and at times genuinely comic. If anything, the ambiguity of Bertolucci's method may be more damning to the film's success than the NC-17 sexuality.

For anyone who is at all a fan of this master filmmaker's work, it's clear that you need to see his movies in the theater. Lately they have not been staying there all that long, and it's a bit dismaying to recall that this director of recent mid-budget art house fare (Besieged, Stealing Beauty) once scaled epic heights. His 1988 The Last Emperor won all nine of the Oscars it was nominated for, and his 1972 Last Tango in Paris set off a world-wide stir, permanently adding that coinage into the lexicon. Bertolucci is one of the last of a dying breed, the intellectual filmmaker with a ravishing eye, engaged enough in left-wing politics to depict it with equal parts affection and criticism.

Based on Gilbert Adair's 1989 novel The Holy Innocents: A Romance, the story concerns Matthew, a 19-year-old American cinephile in Paris during the 1968 student uprisings, and his sudden friendship with two siblings, 17-year-olds Theo and Isabelle. Their connection is the famed Cinémathèque Française, curated by Henri Langlois, but they break the ice not at one of the many screenings they have attended together, but at a protest of Langlois' dismissal by the French government. When Theo and Isabelle's parents go on holiday, they insist that Matthew move in with them, and the three sink into a “folie a trois” that turns games based on recognizing scenes acted out from movies into dares involving sexual voyeurism and intimacy.

One hesitates to give away too much, but suffice it to say that some of Bertolucci's customary obsessions come into play: intimations of incest, loss of virginity, mad love of cinema, and the unavoidable intrusion of the political world into that of the psyche. As early as 1964, in Before the Revolution, his second film and what some consider his first masterpiece (the director was 24 at the time), Bertolucci told the arresting story of a young man, obsessed equally with Marx, Freud and Howard Hawks, who first learns about love from his aunt in a doomed relationship. So, in a sense, The Dreamers is an educational project, with a cast born two decades after that nascent triumph; an attempt by Bertolucci to reach a young audience rather than play to his aging fans.

This is where he succeeds best, palpably evoking the feeling of youthful freedom and exploration, including fair license with another's body. There's no Hollywood teen comedy (or drama) like it, none with such icky moments, or transporting ones. The director told his young actors that, “when we went to bed in '68, we believed we wouldn't wake up the next day, but in the future, and what the future meant was a place where you could actually change the world.” That emotion has seeped into the performances, and it is that atmosphere which arguably distinguishes this movie.

Eventually the inherent shadows of their situation encroach on the three. They run out of money and consider eating slop, Matthew pushes for Isabelle to loosen her all-too-tight bond with her brother, Theo plots his revenge, and the social unrest that once seemed as distant as the black and white movies at the Cinémathèque becomes the ultimate test of each one's character.

Which is where the ambiguity lies. One question at the end of The Dreamers is whether Bertolucci has rejected his Marxist roots. Are the titular dreamers simply spoiled kids, high on cinema, looking for the next real thrill? Or are they awakened from their dream in a meaningful way?

We don't get as much political context as we might need to understand what the demonstrations are all about. There's some sort of official censorship, an American war in Vietnam, a government minister willing to listen to “all reasonable demands,” a garbage strike. But the pieces very pointedly don't come together, and the Maoism espoused by Theo just seems fashionably pulled from filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, the poster of which rules his bedroom. And our Jamesian protagonist, the American confronted with a European culture that is older and strangely unknowable; does he ultimately get the other two to grow up?

It is hard enough for a movie to say one thing effectively, so to have a movie like they used to make ‘em, during the 1960's French New Wave and everywhere else in the 1970's, exploring several different ideas at once, well, it can be hard to “get” the first time around. Bertolucci the sensualist has made a thinking movie that's all about how it feels, hence the big screen experience. So much of the shooting are reveals and concealments, where what's most interesting is what's just beyond the frame – what's around the next book-lined apartment corner, what's going on back under the kitchen table, what's happening on the other side of the door.

The performances are certainly brave in their physical vulnerability, and one expects we'll be seeing these careers blossom over the next decade. As Isabelle, the main object of desire, Eva Green uses not only her body but her haunting eyes to take us from her cool, tough image at the start, cigarette dangling from her lip and chains from her wrists, to the insecure girl only playacting at life. As her brother, Louis Garrel makes the biggest impression, sullen with his parents, an intellectual foil to Matthew, revealing the most in the moments when he watches, a young man on the edge of a decision.

Bertolucci reportedly wanted Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead, but lost him over the nudity. Instead we get the admittedly beautiful Michael Pitt, part-time rock guitarist and singer (he contributes a smoky version of Jimi Hendrix's “Hey, Joe” to the killer soundtrack), who suitably enough has the blond hair and bee-stung lips of David Hemmings, star of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic, Blowup. In some ways the comparison is instructive. Unlike many of its contemporaries, Blowup has aged surprisingly well, a snapshot of its own era draped in the fashions of the times (Hemmings plays an amoral fashion photographer who believes he has accidentally photographed a murder). Just as in The Dreamers, the real world intrudes on the hermetic one, and the audience is left to argue over the qualities of the protagonist. Did he grow? Did he change? Did he get what he deserved?

The Dreamers ends with an aestheticized curtain of fascism, no doubt a harbinger of things to come way back then, and a warning for us today. It's a brace of cold air after the warm wood and hot flesh of the apartment, more of a piece with the film clips sprinkled earlier, certainly by design.

The ultimate question, of real commitment to social change, isn't one asked very often in today's success-only media, and the ambiguity of each individual character's true values make it even more challenging for The Dreamers to realize its full potential audience. But for any interested viewer who's adult enough to handle the male-female genitalia and check their sarcastic jealousy for those lucky young actors at the door, there are rewards enough to make The Dreamers worth a trip to the theater.

©2004 Mark Netter
CineScene