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The Dreamers

Movie Review

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

February 6, 2004

(NC-17). Le Gump: While the Paris "revolution" of '68 rages outside their doors, a teenage American expat and a pair of incestuous twins re-create the youth Bernardo Bertolucci never had (and neither did anyone else). Energetic at times, but kind of laughable. With Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green. Written by Gilbert Adair, from his novel. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. (Sex, nudity, vulgarity, nudity and sex). At the Beekman Theater, Second Avenue near 66th Street; the Landmark, East Houston Street at Second Avenue, and the Lincoln Square, Broadway at 68th Street, Manhattan.

While Fox News' salaried ranks of the righteously indignant railed this week about Janet Jackson's overblown asset (you know what we mean), Fox's art-film division, Searchlight, was preparing to release the first NC-17 movie to come out of a major studio division since Fine Line released "Crash" in 1997.

Hypocrisy? No, no, no. Perish the thought. The various elements of an empire as huge as Rupert Murdoch's operate autonomously. In the arena of sex - be it politics or entertainment - one hand, you might say, doesn't know what the other is doing.

However, had Miramax, let's say, released "The Dreamers," don't think Brit Hume and Co. wouldn't be calculating, by micrometer, how ABC and Disney were contributing to the fall of civilization.

How about the fall of cinema? Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," his first feature since "Besieged" (1998) unspools like what it is, an old man's fantasy, set in the Paris of 1968 and rife with incestuous innuendo and coupling on French linoleum. Bertolucci's attempts to mate, in bourgeois captivity, the sexual abandon of youth with both the revolutionary politics of late '60s Paris and the Godardian aesthetic, only make everything look ludicrous: The dialogue is so trite you wouldn't want to be that young again (the opposite of what such a film is supposed to do) and the rococo nature of the erotic entanglements make one pine for the relatively old-fashioned romance of "Last Tango in Paris."

Paris does something to Bertolucci (besides "Tango" and "Dreamers," he shot "The Conformist" there, too). It does something else to us, at least via this particular Bertoluccian gaze. Matthew (Michael Pitt of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") is a footloose American student who seems to settle into the Paris Cinemateque just as Henri Langlois is being ushered out; the scandalous firing of Langlois, the French savior of cinema, and the subsequent cultural demonstrations provide a backdrop to the larger, more violent protests of late spring. They also provide a context for the demi-ménage ... trois of Matthew and Theo and Isabelle (Louis Garrel and Eva Green), two equally film-drunk sensualists whose parents conveniently go on vacation, leaving the mice to play.

Bertolucci is strangely reticent about the implied sex going on between Theo and Isabelle, but not about the Matthew-Isabelle collision, which occurs as a kind of punishment after she fails to recognize Theo's impersonation of Paul Muni in "Scarface" (when Theo similarly falters after Isabelle's aping of Dietrich in "Blonde Venus," his penance is a solo effort, and far more degrading). All this pretentious sex-and-cinephilia becomes tiresome long before the paving stone finally breaks a kitchen window, allowing both fresh air and revolution into the squalid laboratory of sex where Matthew, Theo and Isabelle have been conducting experiments.

Most films that attempt to re-create the past a la "The Dreamers," do so with an elevated sense of the past, even an elevated sense of what that past might mean. Bertolucci, reducing the whole tumultuous '60s era to a wham-bam of period music, portentous gestures and enough ephemera to make you think a head shop exploded, makes one want to throw one's feet up and watch the Super Bowl halftime on TiVo.