Movie Review - Dream lover
Bertolucci’s The Dreamers recalls the glory days of New Wave cinema
Director Bernardo Bertolucci seemed to have lost his edge for a while. Gone was the sublime artfulness of Last Tango in Paris or The Conformist, replaced by the stylized randiness of a middle-aged man working himself into a lather over Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty.
With The Dreamers, Bertolucci has returned to form. This exquisite, invigorating film reminds audiences that there are still filmmakers working in a nearly dead cinematic tradition, distinguished by a commitment to ideas, reverence for film history and a rapturous love for what cinema allows them to say. In The Dreamers, Bertolucci has created a passionate film reminiscent of the infectious energy of the French New Wave of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. And alongside that energy, Bertolucci returns to the spirit of the New Wave by investing his story with a heady, eye-opening undercurrent of politics.
The setting is Paris in the spring of 1968, when the city exploded with student demonstrations against the Vietnam War and French tradition. Matthew (Michael Pitt) is a Californian studying French abroad, but he’s so lost in the beguiling ether of the films shown daily at the Cinemathéque Francaise, the growing restlessness on the streets barely registers.
At the Cinemathéque, Matthew meets two fellow slaves to celluloid, the impossibly gorgeous Isabelle (Eva Green), and dark, smoldering Theo (Louis Garrel), a brother and sister as committed to each other as they are to the life of the screen.
Passing some kind of unspoken test at a family dinner with Isabelle and Theo’s glamorous mother and poet father, Matthew is invited to stay at the family’s sprawling, old-world apartment while the parents vacation in the country.
Locked inside a cocoon of youth and wealth, the trio blast Dylan, Joplin and Hendrix, and debate the merits of Buster Keaton vs. Charlie Chaplin. They quote incessantly from their beloved films, which Bertolucci then shows in snippets: Blonde Venus, Freaks, Band of Outsiders, Queen Christina, Shock Corridor. The perpetual wall of wailing guitar and the air of debauched aristocracy that soon envelops the three friends brings to mind consummate ’60s films like Blow-Up and Performance.
The eroticism of the cinema that so ignites their imaginations soon transfers from the theater into their own lives.
But Bertolucci suggests that until the very end, the trio never really awakens from this shared dream life. Like the filmgoer caught in the time-frozen world of the cinema, Matthew, Isabelle and Theo exist in a parallel universe outside of time and logic. The trio holes up in the labyrinthine apartment, foraging in the garbage for scraps of fruit and engaging in a triangle of sexual experimentation. Bertolucci captures in palpable detail the drunken marvel of their seductions, of first sex and first love. Most shockingly, Bertolucci makes the film’s unabashed eroticism feel more democratic in its sexual liberation than art cinema of the past. Rather than make Isabelle the usual ingenue pastry, Bertolucci stresses the sexual charms of Matthew and Theo as well, and shows the differences in cultural sophistication that makes Isabelle more wise and empowered than the sweetly innocent Matthew.
Like young people the world over, Matthew, Theo and Isabelle are infuriated by world events, but they are so caught up in their own dramas, they seem paralyzed to act on the larger world stage. Matthew is an American who objects to his country’s war in Vietnam while his stint in college conveniently exempts him from the draft.
Part of the film’s charm is the affection Bertolucci has for his characters, whom he glorifies rather than chastises for their national characteristics. Matthew, for instance, is mannerly, sweet-natured, sexually modest and somewhat naive. He represents an America where ideals are paramount; the cynicism that infects the more worldly Theo and Isabelle has not worked its way beneath Matthew’s skin.
Bertolucci’s portrait of the French is equally clever and exacting. Despite their aristocratic sophistication, Isabelle and Theo see no irony in being passionately against war but too comfortable in their parents’ enormous apartment to take part in the demonstrations outside their door.
The Dreamers is a true homage to cinema’s power. Bertolucci never entirely dismisses film as pure escapism, but instead captures its sense of possibility and ability to make us feel we can communicate with another time and place, much as The Dreamers does. Like Cold Mountain, Dreamers is set in the past but contains the spirit of its own age.
Bertolucci’s film is a wake-up call to the world’s dreaming. Set amidst the turmoil of Vietnam, it has clear parallels to our own Iraqi imbroglio. And as much as it glorifies film, The Dreamers extols viewers to — like Theo, Isabelle and Matthew — leave the false security of that theater and that apartment and change the world.