Dreamers, The

There's a lot of publicity surrounding The Dreamers. Bernado Bertolucci's paean to French cinema and politics in 1968, The Dreamers is the first high-profile NC-17 release since 1997, and suitably so. It's ripe with nudity and sex and is only suitable viewing for adults and mature teens. But the adult content is never exploitive, and to criticize its frank approach to the subject matter would be prudishness of the most extreme kind. Unfortunately, the sex is the only real reason to see The Dreamers; everything else is a profound disappointment.

In a terrible voice-over, we are introduced to Matthew (Michael Pitt), a self-described film buff from San Diego in Paris to study French. As he arrives, the Cinematheque Francais has been shut down and its founder, Henri Langois, ousted. Cinema fans are furious, staging protests and rallies; eventually it becomes a revolt, threatening to overthrow the entire government. These events set the stage for The Dreamers, and they act as background material until the end.

At one of these protests, Matthew meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel), a pair of film fanatics he befriends. He is invited back to their parents' apartment for dinner. Theo and Isabelle's parents are leaving for a month, and the twins invite Matthew to stay. During his first night there, he witnesses Theo and Isabelle in bed together, naked, sleeping. When Theo fails to answer a movie trivia question correctly, Isabelle instructs him to masturbate in front of her. Matthew fails a quiz and is instructed to make love to Isabelle. At first Matthew is disturbed by this, but soon he immerses himself in their world, intoxicated by the strangeness of it all.

And the characters talk. They talk about revolution, they talk about film, they talk about music, they talk about sex. But the dialogue is terrible, unbelievably inane and pretentious. And these characters, whom Bertolucci seems so fond of, are simply insufferable. It's hard to pity someone when all we want them to do is shut the hell up.

The Dreamers relies too strongly on nostalgia. Bertolucci was alive and in France at this time. He knows what it was like to live through the rise of French New Wave cinema, through the riots, through the sex. I wasn't there; I wasn't even born yet, so nothing here connects. I know Godard, Renoir, Truffaut, but I wasn't around during their formative periods. Bertolucci intercuts the film with footage from classic films of the age, but I don't share his nostaligia, so this comes across as pretentious and self-indulgent.

As Michael, Matthew Pitt has the energy and charisma of a fencepost; he delivers his lines as though he were on strong barbiturates. Both Eva Green and Louis Garrel fare better, despite their terrible characters. Green, in particular, displays a sort of easy sexuality that is kind of scary.

For the whole running length, the visuals of The Dreamers are spectacular, hinting at deeper meanings that never develop. But instead of exploiting his strengths as a visual story-teller, Bertolucci turns The Dreamers into a character-based drama focusing on characters we hate. At two points in the film, Matthew and Theo argue over artistic comparisons: the first is Keaton vs. Chaplin; the second, Clapton vs. Hendrix. Each argues their side ferociously. The thing is, they're the only ones that care.

© 2004 Matt Noller