This was one of the more controversial major films of the last decade. Set during the Paris student riots of 1968, the story (adapted by film critic Gilbert Adair from his novel) is a Henry James-esque literary stand-by... bright young man far from home (usually with an uncanny resemblance to the author's self-image) falls in with some rich, decadent beautiful young Europeans and experiences sexual awakening and/or first love tinged with disillusionment.
Bertolucci uses that familiar set-up as jumping-off point for a nostalgic celebration of 1960s French New Wave cinema and 1960s French New Wave film criticism that elevated films like SCARFACE and BLONDE VENUS to the canonical level of Rimbaud or Baudelaire. In particular THE DREAMERS is an homage to Godard's 1964 Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders). The plot is different but the dynamic is all there; a goofy boy, a freakishly handsome boy and a tragically beautiful girl causing trouble in Paris while swapping partners. I would bet money that Bertolucci's primary criterion in casting Eva Green was her ability to duplicate Anna Karina's big-eyed tragic expression with inverted-V eyebrows. Clips from old films are inserted throughout, most interestingly when the trio recreates the race through the Louvre from Bande à Part with the original intercut with the recreation. (The scene made we wonder whether the Louvre has had to add security measures to prevent copy-cat races.)
The connection between cinema and the riots of ’68 isn’t only in Bertolucci’s head. The turmoil that eventually threatened the entire government began as a protest over the ouster of legendary Cinematheque Francais founder of Henri Langlois. (The opening of THE DREAMERS brought to mind the rioting spilling into the Paris premiere of Jean Rollin's LE VIOL DE VAMPIRE–a true story detailed in the book Immoral Tales.)
I enjoyed the heck out of THE DREAMERS, but it does bear the earmarks of a fading artist's work–quietly lovely but self-referential and made with the careful hesitantly of an old man walking down steps. Each shot is as visually rich as a painting, but a carefully posed painting. Fortunately the controversial sexual candor compensates, putting some content pep in the faltering artistic step. (THE DREAMERS might be a bore without the eroticism, but WAR AND PEACE would be a bore without Napoleon. There is a lower artistic threshold for sexy or action packed movies because the content is intrinsically interesting. Subject is an artistic decision and nobody deserves extra credit for picking boring topics.)
The Plot: American student Matthew (Michael Pitt from Hedwig and the Angry Inch), falls in with twin brother and sister Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel) who share his intellectual dream-world devotion to cinema. They playfully challenge each other to identify dialogue and pantomimes from movies. After Matthew accepts their hospitality the movie game becomes a sort of late-night Truth or Dare where the siblings demand sexual performances of each other to pay for missed questions. Matthew knows Theo and Isabelle sleep together in the nude and presumes they're an incestuous couple, but that doesn't stop him from falling hard for Isabelle. (And, to some ambiguous degree, Theo.) Presumably Theo and Isabelle form one personality representing between them the spectrum of everything beautiful and malignant about renaissance and revolution. (It seems that love is the good part and violence the bad part–who saw that coming?)
Eva Green's Isabelle is every inch the siren, complete with Charlotte Rampling-esque exotic eyes and a lithe, aggressively sexy and very European figure that’s on constant display. (Throughout most of the film she wears only a transparent negligee of the sort familiar to everyone who has seen Borowczyk's LA BETE.) Theo is a very handsome young man, though more bluntly masculine than most movie heart-throbs. Fair enough, since he's the male half of a male-female duality. Since I'm objectifying the cast here, Matthew looks like Leo DiCapprio's smarter but less pretty brother. The DVD extras include a lot of interesting material about May 1968 when the smell of tear gas permeated the City of Light for weeks.
DVD FEATURES: Aspect ratio 1.85:1; Available subtitles: English, Spanish; Available Audio: English (DD 5.1), French (DD 2.0 Surround), Spanish (DD 2.0 Surround); NC-17 version; Commentary by director Bernardo Bertolucci, writer Gilbert Adair, and producer Jeremy Thomas; "Events of May '68" featurette; "The Making of The Dreamers" featurette; Michael Pitt "Hey Joe" music video; Theatrical trailer.
One symbol in particular nags at me, but I must enclose this with a spoiler warning… *//Spoiler//* Rather than enduring the shame of the grown-ups knowing their true selves there's a suicide-by-gas attempt that is only thwarted when random protestors throw a brick through a window, letting the deadly gas escape. (And awakening the dreamers.) I assume that the revolution awakens us from our deathly sleep and forces the conflicts and burdens of self-awareness and responsibility upon us... or something. My question is whether the shattered window is connected to the window Sylvia Pinal shatters in Luis Bunuel's THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), or the broken window that saves the lovers in BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (1944), or neither, or something else?
