Bertolucci's startlingly seductive meditation on Paris May 1968 juxtaposes three strands of revolution - political, cinematic, and sexual. The first strand is given short shrift and is at best dodgy: why are the demonstrators shown as communists when they were in the main gauchistes (anarchists, trotskyists, maoists)? The second strand is clever, risky and often brilliant, as in the reprise of the race through the Louvre from Godard's Bande a Part (1964). The third strand is so dominant that a friend of mine was provoked to comment as follows: "Pretty please with a cherry on top - spare us an old man's wet dreams." Or is the old man successfully heightening the graphic transgressive sex we all loved in Last Tango in Paris (1972)?
It is his most interesting film since Last Tango. Some viewers will reflect on how politics, cinema and sex connect. After all did not that cultural revolution which fused the political and the personal bring ten million workers out on strike, almost topple the French government, and arguably change the face of the world?
The games played by Eva Green (stunningly generous with her bodily fluids as Isabelle), Louis Garrel (utopianly ardent as her incestuous twin Theo), and Michael Pitt (the baby-faced American innocent abroad as Matthew) may be infantile. And yet the left-wing communism whch Lenin called infantile was defended by the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit in his Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative (1968). And "Take your desires for reality" was a central slogan o May 68. But the politics of all this is barely addressed in the film. And of course everything is recuperable. Even the Guardian Weekend (21/8/04) can see The Dreamers as a mere exercise in radical chic.
Bertolucci's film is irksomely ambitious. There is a dearth of intelligent films on 1968. Nothing surpasses Godard's La Chinoise (1967) and Weekend (1968). The spectator of The Dreamers is left perplexed and dazzled rather than delighted and enlightened. Is the film homage or satire? Where does Bertolucci stand? Does he do justice to the cultural revolution launched in the name of Henri Langlois' Cinematheque against De Gaulle's minister of culture Andre Malraux? Is his film a fitting tribute to 1968, or a fragrantly decadent cop-out? And in the last resort does The Dreamers live up to Yeats's slogan "In dreams begins responsibility"?
Bertolucci's controversial return to Last Tango territory, The Dreamers is a heady brew of sex and politics for cineastes. Set in Paris during the revolutionary spring of 1968, twins Louis Garrel and Eva Green invite American student Michael Pitt to stay at their parents' apartment, where their indulgence in art, cinema and sex is taken to extremes.
The first thing is that Bertolucci produces a terrific homage to cinema in his dream of Paris 1968. In words, cuts and mise-en-scene there are implicit and explicit re... more >
The first thing is that Bertolucci produces a terrific homage to cinema in his dream of Paris 1968. In words, cuts and mise-en-scene there are implicit and explicit references everywhere to other film, inevitably and particularly to Godard. But none of this is at all burdensome, The Dreamers is a celebration of cinema and a real tour de force.
The second thing is that while the film opens with protests at the government interfering in the Cinematheque Francaise and really engages with them, we soon move to the private world of the three protagonists. The major part of the strikes and protests that transformed France and much else in the world in May 1968 happens off screen with no intrusion on the right of passage that the film follows.
The third thing is that this is a very easy film to overanalyse. It is surely not a coincidence that the set up is an innocent American taken up by a French Brother and Sister, technically virginal but inevitably corrupted by their history and background. The book on which the film was based did seem to deal in metaphor but Bertolucci deals in allusions. We should just appreciate the resonances not try and justify it all.
The fourth thing is this is a dream not a plot. The end is distanced from the start by events but the central core of the film is a situation, neither comedy nor tragedy. Three young people fend for themselves in a flat in Paris, go out very little and become entangled. There is a lot of sex and plenty of transgression. People bounce off each other, grow up a little and change each other but, in the end, not by very much.
The most important thing is that this is Bertolucci. Out there, exploring, not looking to defend himself, delighted to shock your politics, taste or prudity. If your friend is upset or doesn’t like this film, you will not be able to defend it. That’s not what it is for.
< less
9 Songs 
MovieMail Latest
RSS Feeds | Podcast | October Film Catalogue | Subscribe to our email newsletter!
The Dreamers 
