Bernardo Bertulucci has a solid place in modern filmmaking. A genuine iconoclast, he has produced movies of lasting value although, perhaps, of more interest to serious cinema lovers and film academics than to a wider audience.
Bertulucci's vision of film is that of a political activist in a director's chair. Film to him matters for far more than its transient entertainment value. Bertulucci has stated that "cinema is the true poetic language" and in "The Dreamers" he has gone further than in previous efforts to unite a love of film with his heartfelt belief that it encompasses and presents the realities of both personal experience and political change and turmoil.
The year is 1968. It was, as I well remember as a military intelligence, General Staff Army officer in the Pentagon, a disturbing and troubled year. Anti-war demonstrations, often violent, racial unrest leading to major upheavals in America's cities, Resurrection City, distrust of government and the political process, the "Police Riot" during the Chicago Democratic Convention - these and other events were the fragile tinderboxes of widespread dissent. But compared to France, the United States was experiencing unpleasant but ultimately absorbed and defanged behavior The country's youth, a minority of them, demonstrated, a few committed major crimes and most cared about futures in which they believed. Racial bigotry and discrimination produced some change, not enough but not so little as to sustain recurring rioting.
In France the Republic came close to falling as first students and then workers battled police with a fierceness that threatened social and political stability. Three characters in "The Dreamers," each a devoted cinephile, fall into an unusual - and for some audience members today unsettling- menage a trois as they try to reconcile a love of film with a Paris of threatening disorder and violent change.
American Matthew, played by a dreamily listless Michael Pitt, is using his student deferment to study French. At a demonstration protesting the government-ordered closing of a major movie theater devoted to the full range of film history, he meets beautiful Isabel, Eva Green, and her brother, Theo, Louis Garmel. A friendship quickly develops and the siblings invite Mathew to their parent's spacious but cluttered apartment, first for a meal and then to stay while the parents go on holiday.
Theo disdains his author/father and behaves like the petulant child he really is. He fancies himself an intellectual but Bugs Bunny has expressed deeper thoughts. Theo is the stereotype of the "don't trust anyone over thirty" character of those days.
Matthew realizes that Theo and Isabel are unusually close for siblings. In point of fact they have a physical relationship, the depth of which is never fully revealed. Matthew is drawn into explicitly shown sex with Isabel, the reason for the rare NC-17 that is the movie's rating (I.D. was actually checked at the ticket booth and anyone looking south of age 25 had to proffer acceptable documentation). Too many reviews of this movie emphasize the incestuous relationship to the exclusion of more important themes.
The trio acts out various tableaux based on questions about classic film scenes which are interspersed throughout the game-playing which is a central part of the siblings' interaction. However sensational the sex scenes are to some, Bertulucci's key success is showing the insidious transformation of harmless games into a coda for sexuality and political belief and action. For Theo, film is a reality that transmogrifies his world view. An increasingly credulous, and sensible, Matthew is madly in lust with Isabel but when Theo asks him to consider China's Great Cultural Revolution as a glorious film with Mao as director and millions as the cast he knows something is amiss with his friend.
In the Bertulucci tradition of a film within a film, the three-way sexual relationship is both an encounter with and a retreat from reality. But the world can't be kept at bay forever as Bertulucci shows in the final scenes.
Hardly a perfect film, "The Dreamers" is, once the sexual explicitness is relegated to its proper place, a homily about how film matters but that it may not always be a safe harbor for its devotees. The non-physical relationship of the three young people is far deeper and more interesting than the erotic aspect.
There's little chance a movie with an NC-17 rating will be in many theaters or play long in those where it is booked. But anyone serious about the relevance of a vibrant cinema owes Bertulucci a careful viewing of "The Dreamers."
At the end of the trailer there was a magnificent absurdity (this can't possibly be deemed a spoiler). We're all used to being assured that no animals were harmed during filming. This one proclaims that "Indigenous trees were planted to offset the release of carbon dioxide during filming." Political correctness to the nth degree.
7/10.
Bertulucci's vision of film is that of a political activist in a director's chair. Film to him matters for far more than its transient entertainment value. Bertulucci has stated that "cinema is the true poetic language" and in "The Dreamers" he has gone further than in previous efforts to unite a love of film with his heartfelt belief that it encompasses and presents the realities of both personal experience and political change and turmoil.
The year is 1968. It was, as I well remember as a military intelligence, General Staff Army officer in the Pentagon, a disturbing and troubled year. Anti-war demonstrations, often violent, racial unrest leading to major upheavals in America's cities, Resurrection City, distrust of government and the political process, the "Police Riot" during the Chicago Democratic Convention - these and other events were the fragile tinderboxes of widespread dissent. But compared to France, the United States was experiencing unpleasant but ultimately absorbed and defanged behavior The country's youth, a minority of them, demonstrated, a few committed major crimes and most cared about futures in which they believed. Racial bigotry and discrimination produced some change, not enough but not so little as to sustain recurring rioting.
In France the Republic came close to falling as first students and then workers battled police with a fierceness that threatened social and political stability. Three characters in "The Dreamers," each a devoted cinephile, fall into an unusual - and for some audience members today unsettling- menage a trois as they try to reconcile a love of film with a Paris of threatening disorder and violent change.
American Matthew, played by a dreamily listless Michael Pitt, is using his student deferment to study French. At a demonstration protesting the government-ordered closing of a major movie theater devoted to the full range of film history, he meets beautiful Isabel, Eva Green, and her brother, Theo, Louis Garmel. A friendship quickly develops and the siblings invite Mathew to their parent's spacious but cluttered apartment, first for a meal and then to stay while the parents go on holiday.
Theo disdains his author/father and behaves like the petulant child he really is. He fancies himself an intellectual but Bugs Bunny has expressed deeper thoughts. Theo is the stereotype of the "don't trust anyone over thirty" character of those days.
Matthew realizes that Theo and Isabel are unusually close for siblings. In point of fact they have a physical relationship, the depth of which is never fully revealed. Matthew is drawn into explicitly shown sex with Isabel, the reason for the rare NC-17 that is the movie's rating (I.D. was actually checked at the ticket booth and anyone looking south of age 25 had to proffer acceptable documentation). Too many reviews of this movie emphasize the incestuous relationship to the exclusion of more important themes.
The trio acts out various tableaux based on questions about classic film scenes which are interspersed throughout the game-playing which is a central part of the siblings' interaction. However sensational the sex scenes are to some, Bertulucci's key success is showing the insidious transformation of harmless games into a coda for sexuality and political belief and action. For Theo, film is a reality that transmogrifies his world view. An increasingly credulous, and sensible, Matthew is madly in lust with Isabel but when Theo asks him to consider China's Great Cultural Revolution as a glorious film with Mao as director and millions as the cast he knows something is amiss with his friend.
In the Bertulucci tradition of a film within a film, the three-way sexual relationship is both an encounter with and a retreat from reality. But the world can't be kept at bay forever as Bertulucci shows in the final scenes.
Hardly a perfect film, "The Dreamers" is, once the sexual explicitness is relegated to its proper place, a homily about how film matters but that it may not always be a safe harbor for its devotees. The non-physical relationship of the three young people is far deeper and more interesting than the erotic aspect.
There's little chance a movie with an NC-17 rating will be in many theaters or play long in those where it is booked. But anyone serious about the relevance of a vibrant cinema owes Bertulucci a careful viewing of "The Dreamers."
At the end of the trailer there was a magnificent absurdity (this can't possibly be deemed a spoiler). We're all used to being assured that no animals were harmed during filming. This one proclaims that "Indigenous trees were planted to offset the release of carbon dioxide during filming." Political correctness to the nth degree.
7/10.