Movies into Film

The Dreamers

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

France/Italy/UK/USA, 2004

Movies in Your Mind

In the tub: Pitt, Green, Garrel (Photo: Fox Searchlight)

After seeing The Dreamers, my first impression was to dismiss it as an entertaining, shallow work of an aging cinéaste eager to pay homage to the films he loved in youth. The Dreamers may still be only that and nothing more, yet as I woke in the night from a late afternoon catnap, my first thoughts were of Theo and Isabelle, the quasi-incestuous Paris twins, tramping about their gloomy flat, and of Matthew, the young American whom they capture. The characters spun round in my head as if they were not finished with me just yet. They had, however briefly, become for me as the images from Godard, Garbo, Chaplin, and Astaire movies are for them—somehow more real than the present.

The film begins unpromisingly. The camera glides by glazed over youth ensconced in the dark of Cinémathèque Française, 1968. “It was here I got my real education,” intones the hooky-playing Matthew (Michael Pitt) in voice-over, an education that consists, regrettably, of trashy Sam Fuller movies. Director Bertolucci and the scenarist Gilbert Adair pile it on high with pretension in such a way that I couldn’t tell if they were joking or reverent. When Theo (Louis Garrel) and Matthew compare notes on the director of Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Guitar, Theo proffers this breast-beating quote: “You know what Godard said about him—Nicholas Ray is cinema!” Later, after Isabelle (Eva Green) and her brother have made Matthew an indefinite houseguest, the twins act out scenes from their favored films as a form of one-upmanship.

Comparisons to Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris are few. Sure, Pitt resembles a baby Brando in some shots; however, The Dreamers daintily sidesteps that earlier film’s sadism and cruelty. Whereas Maria Schneider’s Jeanne claimed that she would eat pig vomit in order to “prove her love” to Brando’s Paul, Matthew flatly refuses to shave his pubic hair when the twins demand it for the exact same reason. In this film’s nerviest sequence, when Isabelle and Matthew can’t guess Theo’s allusions to Scarface, their “forfeit” is to make love as Theo watches them. Isabelle, up to that point, has carried on in a vampish, been-around manner, yet after Matthew has taken her on the kitchen floor, it becomes apparent that she has just lost her virginity. It’s a remarkable scene: simultaneously lovely, repellent, and comical. Both men dip their fingers into her ensanguined cleft, and Matthew, at first disbelieving, then overwhelmed with renewed passion, smears the blood on Isabelle’s face and resumes kissing her. At one point, Bertolucci moves the camera from the lovers to Theo insouciantly cracking eggs into a skillet. They will, after all, be hungry.

Dreamers dreaming (Photo: Fox Searchlight)

Bertolucci dodges the bisexual side of this ménage à trois. In Adair’s novel, The Holy Innocents, upon which he and Bertolucci base The Dreamers, Theo and Matthew also become lovers. (That said, the sin of omission doesn’t hurt this film nearly as much as it did Bertolucci’s incoherent The Sheltering Sky.) Theo seems the most turned-on when Matthew isn’t making little boy lost declarations of gratitude to his hosts; when Matthew challenges Theo’s professed devotion to Maoism, Theo props himself onto Matthew’s backside. (He hops off the instant Isabelle enters the room, a cheat on Bertolucci’s part.)

When I think about the cynical awfulness of movies right now, especially metroplex movies, and of the crass dopiness that masquerades as film criticism in dailies, alt-weeklies, and on the net, that smug superiority that many reviewers project, indeed, lord over films that ask us to feel something besides numbness, I begin to sense why the unpunished idealists of The Dreamers affect me as they do. – NPT

February 2004

Movies into Film

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