Title:  The Dreamers

Release Date:  2004

Nationality and Language: France, Italy: French, English

Running time: 115 Min

MPAA Rating:  NC-17

Distributor and Production Company:  Fox Searchlight

Director; Writer: Bernardo Bertolucci, based on novel The Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair (1988)

Producer:

Cast:   Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel

Technical: HDCAM

Relevance to doaskdotell site:

Review:

In 1968 an American Exchange student Matthew (Michael Pitt, who rather resembles Leonardo Di Caprio) gets taken in by Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and a very juvenile looking Louis Garrel), fraternal twins looking for someone to initiate, when there celebrated father (an author) goes away from their Paris apartment. Outside left-wing protests against French labor policy are mounting. Matthew is a film buff, and the film often breaks its narrative by showing parallel passages in various mostly black-and-white films, one with a demonstration of CinemaScope. In time, this movie becomes a “coming of age” story with interplay between the movies they watch and their lives in this old apartment with its rich “geography.” Pitt’s wholesome performance (although he smokes) makes Matthew an effective protagonist, like the young adults on a number of dramatic TV shows today. Matthew seems to simply want to generalize or enlarge his “moral world” by experiencing things as a young man, before he makes up his mind about a lot of things. At the beginning of the film, he is an effective narrator, as he talks about film buffs and real life.

 The story will flip like “a dream” between outside politics, the characters intimate experiments, and old films, as if they were all parallel worlds. In the mean time, Matthew finds that his own (as well as Isabelle’s) sexual initiation (after a physical one sprinting under the time clock through the Loeuvre) turns out to be quite a tribunal itself. He gets undressed in dirty dancing fashion, all right (so that he can deflower her  -- as he is chased through the apartment by Theo he manages to change his shirt from a polo to a fully buttoned one before getting “captured” and held in place from behind by Theo while Isabelle encroaches from the bottom – quite curious), but draws the line at a most critical point, where, at least, he is taunted (as “proof of love”) with possible humiliation starting with the application of shaving cream to a private area. He is not interested in something that invokes a male flip of Boxing Helena. (No Lorena Bobbit here, please.) He lectures the twins that they need to grow up and start to leave their fantasy world for real lives.  There is the constant sexual tension between Matthew and Theo also (although Theo says Matt is not his “type” just before his sister is to be deflowered), as in a bathtub scene that reminds me of The Talented Mr. Ripley. But their male bonding turns to political discourse about revolution, war, violence, about who is expendable for politicians. (Matthew says he is not in Vietnam because he is non-violent, but then comes up with the idea of conscripted cannon fodder. Bertolucci claims that Pitt ad-libed this idea. The twins also talk about filmmaking as “voyeuristic,” as if one could film one’s parents intimacies – a possible unstated assumption that a parental marriage bond, to be active and permanent and committed, presumes that their kids will carry on their biological legacy.  Theo is interested in the bookish idea of revolution than doing it. Or is he? This is a bit like Michael Moore here, but, I think, more complete and objective. Again, it also brings back Last Tango in Paris. This is the first film to get an official MPAA NC-17 in six years (remember James Spader in Crash?), and it makes a great case that NC-17 should not be a stigma. But at one time (when Midnight Cowboy came out in 1968), neither was X.

The commentary of the DVD indicates that Matthew is gay in the book but not in the film (although Theo comes across as rather gay); but what is more important is that the brother and sister look at themselves as “Freaks” as in the well known 30s horror film, and Matthew finds himself drawn into their world and threatened with becoming one himself (as in the humiliation scene).

The DVD contains a 50 minute “short” “Bertolucci films ‘The Dreamers.’”

(Ann Beeson of the ACLU made a reference to this film in her oral arguments before the Supreme Court on 3/2/2004 in the challenge to COPA, the Child Online Protection Act of 1998.)

A “ones complement” to the Bertolucci film is a My Super 8 Season (“Ma Saison Super 8,” 2005, Du Contraire / Anitprod, dir. Alessandro Avellis, France, 71 min, sug NC-17) traces the “left wing” in France starting with the 1968 protests above, all the way into the 1970s, as a docudrama involving several characters. There is Marc (Axel Philippon) jump starting a gay rights movement while his platonic female friend Julie (Celia Pelastre) pushes worker’s rights. Marc angers his father, a cop, involved in a bust with a factory worker Andre, who claims to be straight but becomes attracted to Marc. Though the relationships roughly parallel those of the Bertolucci film, the pace is much faster and, even with the explicit nude scenes, the movie loses the tension that the Bertolucci film developed with this subject matter. In the film’s middle, there are interesting ideological discussions about how gays fit in to the people’s and women’s movements; there are some objections to gays even on the left, and odd discussions about the idea that male homosexuality fan reinforce stereotypes about “virility.” In fact, as the years progress, Marc appears more “mature” physically, although there is a problem that the characters tend to look and act too much alike, a problem within far left movements. The title of the film refers to Andre’s habit of shooting Super 8 videos (with 70s technology) of sex scenes, that look even too grainy for “Deep Throat.”