The cultural revolution reflected in the personal lives of the young people is a distraction. Better to enjoy the movie for the beauty and delight of its love story alone.
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Full-frontal nudity is something we haven't seen much of in mainstream movies since the seventies, when director Bernardo Bertolucci was shocking the world with "Last Tango in Paris." He returns to his roots, so to speak, in 2003's "The Dreamers."
The new film attempts to combine politics, cinema, and sex in a journey of self-discovery for three young people in late sixties' Paris. That it appears to find Bertolucci trapped in a time warp seems almost beside the point. His trying to make a comment on the way people behaved back then and how events of the day influenced people's lives is almost secondary to our fascination with the gorgeous people involved.
More often than not, Bertolucci's pictures ("Last Tango," "1900," "The Last Emperor," "Sheltering Sky," "Stealing Beauty") have a subtext, but it's the characters that are more interesting than anything they might symbolize. So it is with "The Dreamers." Ostensibly, the film is about how the rebellious youths of the late sixties' cultural revolution eventually assimilated into regular, consumer-oriented society. More important, it's about knowing who we are and where we're going. And most important of all, it's about beautiful people with their clothes off. OK. Now you know where I stand.
The setting for this bit of sociopolitical erotica is Paris, 1968, where a young twenty-year-old American, Matthew, has come to study French. But he's also a cinemaphile, an avid film buff, and spends most of his free time at the Cinematheque Francaise. "Only the French," he tells us, "would house a cinema inside a palace." It was a time when people were taking film seriously as an art form, and Matthew is always "the one sitting closest to the screen," having an insatiable appetite for motion pictures. He will soon come to have an insatiable appetite for other things when he meets Theo and Isabelle, a brother and sister of about Matthew's age with a love for film almost as compulsive as his own. Their mutual love of film draws them together, and before long they invite Matthew to live in their apartment while their parents are away for a month.
There, Matthew discovers more than he bargained for. Like the unusual relationship of the brother and sister, who claim to be twins even though they don't look much alike. For one thing, they bath and sleep together nude; but just that, bath and sleep only. And they enjoy playing intimate games with Matthew, finally introducing him to one that requires that he make love to Isabelle, where he discovers that the seemingly worldly young lady is not so experienced after all. Their initial sexual awakening becomes a coming of age for both of them. From then on, the two spend most of their waking hours making love, with Theo a semi-bystander. And so it goes until the end of the film and the parents' return, when the three young people finally become involved, ironically one way or another, in something other than themselves.
Oh, I haven't mentioned much about the war in the streets, have I. It's probably because after introducing it, Bertolucci practically forgets about it himself. In 1968 Henri Langlois, founder of the Paris Cinematheque Francaise, was driven out of office by city officials, which set off a series of riots in Paris that eventually developed into a wholesale revolt against the country's government. But once our film's young people discover the joys of sex, they forget about everything else--revolutions, movies, communism, the Vietnam War, whatever. Bertolucci uses the young people's sexual awakening as a symbol of the revolutions around and within them, but mainly it's just sex.
Matthew is played by Michael Pitt, an actor who resembles a youthful Leonardo DiCaprio, a dewy-eyed novitiate with dark blond hair and a shy, naive smile. Unfortunately, Pitt has all the screen presence of a Swedish turnip, and beyond his sweet good looks is rather a washout. Maybe that's all he's supposed to be. More to the point is Eva Green as Isabelle. She's a knockout looker and a commanding actress. When she's around, the viewer cannot help but stay tuned to the story, whether she's in or out of her clothes. Ms. Green conveys a wealth of sensuality and a childlike innocence at the same time. And Louis Garrel plays Theo, the brother, a dark-eyed, sultry type with a likeness to silent screen stars. Yet we find that he, too, is far more unsophisticated than he looks and acts.
Fox is making the film available in two forms, it's original, uncut NC-17 theatrical version and an R-rated version for the Blockbuster crowd. Fox's press notes tell us that the NC-17 version "marked the first time in six years that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) signatory has released a film with this rating." For the review they sent me the NC-17 edition, which presumably contains more nudity and sex than the R-rated one. I don't know. There is nothing obscene about the picture, to be sure, the nudity quite beautiful and the sex discreetly filmed.
But the nudity and sex are neither here nor there. Bertolucci's intentions are clearly to make the eroticism represent something else, which rather detracts from the merits of the romance. For instance, there is a clichéd scene at the beginning where Theo gets mad at his father, a famous poet, for having turned away from the insubordination and questioning attitude of his youth and settled into middle-aged conformity, a condition we see Theo has fallen into himself. Theo is content to spout words about cultural rebellion, but it's sexual rebellion he's most interested in. The question is, so what?
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