The biggest draw of Bernardo Bertolucci's new film, The Dreamers, is no doubt its sexually explicit subject matter and its supposedly scandalous rating of NC-17. Sure, plenty of serious, lower-profile works--overwhelmingly foreign and usually French in origin--make it into theaters each year with ample nudity and graphic sex (such as Irreversible, Baise-moi, Romance, Fat Girl, and Trouble Every Day). But, of late, only the distributor of The Dreamers has found it in its interest to go in for MPAA rating approval. So now we have before us the first NC-17 release by a major studio in more than half a dozen years. That's effective grist for the publicity mill and an easy lure at the box office, but does the film rise above the level of mere titillating provocation?
Yes and no. With an enormously talented and recognized master at the helm and an intriguing premise, The Dreamers clearly always had more on its mind than being a by-the-numbers, late-night skin flick. But it also never quite realizes any of its ambitions, with inspiration coming only in fits and starts.
Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American college student abroad in France, sets the scene in his opening narration. It's Paris, spring of 1968, at the charged, historic intersection of three different revolutions; at this point, our blond-haired, blue-eyed innocent remains more or less oblivious to two of them.
The film's first revolution is artistic. Like so many other students at that time, Matthew has been swept up in a wave of cinephilia. Feeding his all-consuming passion, he makes the daily pilgrimage to screenings at the Cinémathèque Française as part of the '60s burgeoning film culture, walking in the movie-obsessed footsteps of ground-breaking New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
The film's other two strands--the sexual and the political--enter soon after. A mass protest breaks out when the Cinémathèque's beloved founder and curator Henri Langlois is fired. This event, which will go on to spark the city's momentous May student uprisings, confronts Matthew with the divisive youth politics of the day. That then slides to the periphery as he comes upon two beguiling French students and fellow movie-lovers, Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother Théo (Louis Garrel). Bertolucci, working his self-conscious conceit of making a movie about movies, has Isabelle appear to Matthew like a character out of a film, a gorgeous ingénue with shades of New Wave vamps like Jeanne Moreau and Françoise Hardy. Cigarette dangling from her lip and red beret tilted atop her head, she flirts with him, introduces Théo, and invites him back to their place, a spacious bourgeois flat.
When the twins' parents leave the following morning on an extended trip, Isabelle insists that Matthew move in. Taken with their outward sophistication and enamored with Isabelle, he can't resist. However, things soon escalate. The siblings' ambiguous relationship seems more and more incestuous and their uninhibited behavior shocks shy Matthew. Then, twisting the notion of cinephilia, cinema becomes the gateway into sexual experimentation. In a bizarre game of their own devising, the twins act out indelible movie moments, demanding that the other guess the cited film or "forfeit." Théo can't name Marlene Dietrich's gorilla dance from Blonde Venus, so he's made to masturbate before a poster of the icon while the others watch. When Isabelle blanks on a scene from Hawks' Scarface, Théo orders her to finally break the sexual tension, give herself up to awestruck Matthew, and initiate a weirdly rebellious ménage à trois.
As The Dreamers grows more preposterous, its whole creative engine of startling cinema-sex-politics conflations becomes increasingly muddled--though never less than memorable. Nothing really holds Bertolucci's strained exercise together apart from his consistently assured style, which occasionally crystallizes narrative dynamics beautifully, but more often than not, simply applies a pleasing surface sheen. His fluid exploration of the flat makes it almost a character in its own right. And when the nubile trio takes a bath together, Bertolucci frames it against a suggestively shifting three-paned mirror.
When it comes to the film's preoccupation with movies, Bertolucci is never able to convey a believable sense of the movie-mad wonder which would seem crucial to capturing the era and his passionate characters. Wall-to-wall music cues and glib name-dropping work to conjure up the late '60s: Dylan, The Doors, The Grateful Dead, and a back-and-forth about the relative merits of Clapton versus Hendrix (whose "Third Stone from the Sun" serves as the film's adopted theme song). More dramatically, Bertolucci seamlessly interpolates clips from movies as characters mention or pay homage to them. The excerpts range from '30s Hollywood (Queen Christina, Freaks) to New Wave touchstones (Breathless, Band of Outsiders), making The Dreamers dense with cinematic citations.
If the film's three utopian dreamers yearn to live a liberating life expressed through and inspired by cinema, the matter at stake deserves more than simpleminded trivia squabbles, frantic referencing, and last-ditch grasps at political significance. Deep connections never materialize--only a vague feeling for what might have been.
