The
Dreamers
Programme Notes
Matthew: Michael Pitt
Isabelle: Eva Green
Theo: Louis Garrel
Father: Robin Renucci
Mother: Anna Chancellor
Patrick: Florian Cadiou
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. UK/Italy/France 2003
Written by Gilbert Adair, based on his novel The Holy Innocents. Running
time: 115minutes.
In the spring
of 1968, three planets -- Sex, Politics and the Cinema -- came into alignment
and exerted a gravitational pull on the status quo. In Paris, what began as
a protest over the ousting of Henri Langlois, the legendary founder of the Cinemathèque
Française, grew into a popular revolt that threatened to topple the government.
There were barricades in the streets, firebombs, clashes with the police, a
crisis of confidence. In a way that seems inexplicable today, the director Jean-Luc
Godard and his films were at the centre of the maelstrom. Other New Wave directors
and the cinema in general seemed to act as the agitprop arm of the revolution.
I have just seen Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, and am filled with poignant
and powerful nostalgia. To be 16 in 1968 is to be 50 today, and so most younger
moviegoers will find this film as historical as Cold Mountain. For me, it is
yesterday; above all it evokes a time when the movies -- good movies, both classic
and newborn -- were at the centre of youth culture. "The Movie Generation,"
Time magazine called us in a cover story. I got my job at the Sun-Times because
of it; they looked around the features department and appointed the long-haired
new kid who had written a story about the underground films on Monday nights
at Second City.
Bertolucci is two years older than I am. An Italian who made his first important
film, Before the Revolution, when he was only 24, he would in 1972 make Last
Tango in Paris, a film starring Marlon Brando and the unknown Maria Schneider
in a tragedy about loss, grief and sudden sex between two strangers who find
it a form of urgent communication. Pauline Kael said, "Bertolucci and Brando
have altered the face of an art form." Well, in those days we talked about
movies that way.
It is important to have this background in mind when you go to see The Dreamers,
because Bertolucci certainly does. His film, like Last Tango, takes place largely
in a vast Parisian apartment. It is about transgressive sex. Outside the windows,
there are riots in the streets, and indeed, in a moment of obvious symbolism,
a stone thrown through a window saves the lives of the characters, the revolution
interrupting their introverted triangle. The three characters are Matthew (Michael
Pitt), a young American who is in Paris to study for a year but actually spends
all of his time at the Cinemathèque, and the twins Isabelle (Eva Green)
and Theo (Louis Garrel), children of a famous French poet and his British wife.
They also spend all of their time at the movies. Almost the first thing Isabelle
tells Matthew is, "You're awfully clean for someone who goes to the cinema
so much."
He's clean in more ways than one; he's a naive, idealistic American, and the
movie treats him to these strange Europeans in the same way Henry James sacrifices
his Yankee innocents on the altar of continental decadence.
These are the children of the cinema. Isabelle tells Matthew, "I entered
this world on the Champs Elysees in 1959, and my very first words were, "New
York Herald Tribune!" Bertolucci cuts to the opening scene in Godard's
A bout de souffle (1959), one of the founding moments of the New Wave, as Jean
Seberg shouts out those words on the boulevard. In other words, the New Wave,
not her parents, gave birth to Isabelle. There are many moments when the characters
quiz each other about the movies, or re-enact scenes they remember; a particularly
lovely scene has Isabelle moving around a room, touching surfaces, in a perfect
imitation of Garbo in Queen Christina. And there's a bitter argument between
Matthew and Theo about who is greater -- Keaton or Chaplin? Matthew, the American,
of course knows that the answer is Keaton. Only a Frenchman could think it was
Chaplin.
But The Dreamers is not Bertolucci's version of Trivial Pursuit. Within the
apartment, sex becomes the proving ground and then the battle ground for the
revolutionary ideas in the air. Matthew meets the twins at the Cinemathèque
during a demonstration in favour of Henri Langlois (Bertolucci intercuts newsreel
footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud in 1968 with new footage of Léaud
today, and we also get glimpses of Truffaut, Godard and Nicholas Ray). They
invite him back to their parents' apartment. The parents are going to the seaside
for a month, and the twins invite him to stay. At first it is delightful. "I
have at last met some real Parisians!" Matthew writes to his parents. Enclosed
in the claustrophobic world of the apartment, he finds himself absorbed in the
sexual obsessions of the twins. Matthew is sometimes a little drunk, sometimes
high, sometimes driven by lust, but at the bottom he knows this is wrong, and
his more conventional values set up the ending of the film, in which sex and
the cinema are engines, but politics is the train.
The film is extraordinarily beautiful. Bertolucci is one of the great painters
of the screen. He has a voluptuous way here of bathing his characters in scenes
from great movies, and referring to others. Sometimes his movie references are
subtle, and you should look for a lovely one. Matthew looks out of a window
as rain falls on the glass, and the light through the window makes it seem that
the drops are running down his face. This is a quote from a famous shot by Conrad
L. Hall in Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967). And although Michael Pitt usually
looks a little like Leonardo DiCaprio, in this shot, at that angle, with that
lighting, he embodies for a moment the young Marlon Brando. Another quotation:
as the three young people run down an outdoor staircase, they are pursued by
their own giant shadows, in a nod to The Third Man.
Bertolucci entitles his film The Dreamers I think, because his characters are
dreaming, until the brick through the window shatters their cocoon, and the
real world of tear gas and Molotov cocktails enters their lives. It is clear
now that Godard and sexual liberation were never going to change the world.
It only seemed that way, for a time. The people who really run things do not
go much to the movies, or perhaps think much about sex. They are driven by money
and power.
Matthew finds he cannot follow the twins into whatever fantasy the times have
inspired in them. He turns away and disappears into the crowd of rioters, walking
in the opposite direction. Walking into a future in which, perhaps, he will
become the director of this movie.
From a review on the World Socialist Website
Bertolucci
(born in 1940) made Before the Revolution (1964) and The Conformist (1970).
A commentator describes the former film: "In this reworking of Stendhal's
The Charterhouse of Parma, the leading character is a well-to-do boy who fancies
himself a Marxist but ultimately learns he is nothing of the sort. Forced to
decide between radical political commitment and an irreproachably bourgeois
marriage, he opts for the latter, conducting an incestuous affair with an apolitical
aunt along the way and renouncing his communist mentor (and totemic father figure)."
The Conformist is perhaps Bertolucci's most enduring work for its portrayal
of a certain social and emotional type susceptible to authoritarianism. The
leading character, Marcello, becomes obsessed with conformism, after a traumatic
sexual encounter as a youth, to the point of participating in the attempted
murder of his former professor. The scene in which Marcello's fascist colleagues
murder his professor's wife, a crime that he is powerless to stop, stands out
in one's memory after 30 years.
Bertolucci's most celebrated, or notorious, film, Last Tango in Paris (1972),
on the other hand, seems an almost complete and tedious dead-end.
Although Bertolucci returned to examining social life in 1900 (1976), an attempt
to dramatize 45 years of the Italian class struggle, he never recaptured the
intensity of the earlier films. And after 1900 there is virtually nothing worth
commenting upon.
As for the
third "revolution" in The Dreamers, the political one, it receives
remarkably short shrift, especially if one considers that the French workers'
revolt of 1968 led to the most massive general strike since the Russian Revolution
of 1905 and shook European capitalism to its foundations.The representation
of the events is reduced to a handful of references or fleeting glimpses: noises
of street-fighting, a television clip of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou promising
to negotiate with the strikers, a brief sequence at the Sorbonne, Theo's half-hearted
Maoist politics. The eventual scenes of marching students and fighting at the
barricades toward the end of the film are so stilted and unreal they seem to
be drawn from comic-books. What can one say? Bertolucci has the right to his
memory or version of events. But one also has the right to argue for its essential
trivial and trivializing character, what Trotsky called the "self-satisfied
seeking for psychological nits."
Why does an artist's work lose force under changed historical circumstances?
Marxists insist there is a connection between content (not a single lump of
a theme, but a complex of moods and ideas) and artistic form, a connection in
which the former is primary. Naturally, a sensitivity to beauty, a deep feeling
for the structures and relationships of objects, may betoken a seriousness about
the world, but lyricism in art, to take André Breton at his word, is
only the beginning of a protest, not its essential substance. In Art and Social
Life, Plekhanov approvingly cites the comment of nineteenth century art critic
John Ruskin that the merit of a work is determined, "other conditions being
equal," by "the loftiness of the sentiments it expresses." This
entirely legitimate, classical notion is widely and contemptuously rejected
in present-day artistic and intellectual circles.
The considerations in Bertolucci's early films, made at a time of great social
turmoil, of the problems of social revolution, fascism, the pressures of bourgeois
society on intellectuals and artists, sexual and psychic oppression, served
"as a means of communication" between the filmmaker and large numbers
of people. With the emergence of a new mood in the European intelligentsia in
the latter half of the 1970s, "consumed," according to one commentator,
"with cynicism, lechery and suicide," Bertolucci also lost his way.
All that was weak, insincere, unresolved in his aesthetic and social world-view
came to the fore. Does that mean the filmmaker suddenly lost his ability as
an artist, that he no longer knew where to place a camera or how to direct an
actor? The process is more complex. In his study of the Romantic poets, E.P.
Thompson, writing about poet William Wordsworth's later, thoroughly conformist
work, argues "it is not that he became a poorer poet because he changed
his political views, but that his new 'good views' were not held with the same
intensity and authenticity."
What Bertolucci found himself left with by the end of the 1970s, a flaccid mix
of Freudianism, voyeurism and social indifference or skepticism, simply could
not find artistic expression with the same intensity and authenticity as his
previous ideas and moods. No doubt his own sharp falling off, which has a tragic
element, bewilders him. The Dreamers is a further confirmation of this decline.
To be fully
enjoyed, this movie's affectations have to be indulged, but they are allowances
for which you will be repaid with a delectable film. Director Bernardo Bertolucci
has simply given us his best picture for many years, working from an elegant,
urbane screenplay by Gilbert Adair, an adaptation of his semi-autobiographical
novel The Holy Innocents. Thirty-two years ago, Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris
showed obsessive sex in claustrophobic, enclosed spaces, and this is a distant
cousin to that fantasy, though coloured with innocence and naive idealism.
Michael Pitt plays Matthew, who arrives in late-60s Paris full of callow admiration
for the spirit of the times and, among a crowd of protesters, finds the only
two people as unfeasibly pulchritudinous as he is. The absurdly beautiful Louis
Garrel plays Theo, and the slightly less beautiful but Olympic-level sexy Eva
Green is Theo's sister Isabelle; matching scars on their arms show that they
were conjoined twins, separated at birth. Theo and Isabelle are students, madly
over-excited by les événements , but even more excited by all
the movies they've been watching. Almost immediately, they take Matthew under
their wing, insisting he moves into the ramshackle apartment owned by their
rumpled poet father and English mother (Anna Chancellor) who depart for the
country leaving behind them an unwholesome babes-in-the-wood situation. Matthew
is invited to join this quasi-incestuous ménage - which is cheerfully
explicit, and speckled with references to Cocteau, Godard, Truffaut, Tod Browning,
and many, many more. The way Garrel and Green artlessly project the look of
a young Belmondo and Moreau is a cinematic quotation in itself. What about those
classic films? The way these are quoted, and overtly referenced in terms of
actual clips - flatteringly identifiable, in the main - might try the patience
of many, and Michael Pitt's overly precious voiceover at the very beginning,
intoning his memories of the first film he ever saw at the Cinémathèque,
is an unfortunate moment to start with. But this mannerism underlines the hapless,
hopeless fan-devotion of Theo and Isabelle in a lost pre-video, pre-DVD culture
when movies did not exist outside the temple of the cinema. Their political
arguments are pretty cringe-inducing, though they are plausibly cringe-inducing
in the way they would have been at the time, with Theo fatuously claiming that
all his fan-worship constitutes "our very own cultural revolution",
and Mao is like a movie director making an epic.
The Dreamers looks and feels great. The three central performances have the
unselfconscious languor and intensity of extreme youth and the Paris conjured
by Bertolucci and his production designer Jean Rabasse is not disgraced by its
classic-celluloid samplings. Watching this film is like drinking a bottle of
good red wine, all at once, on an empty stomach. Not good for you, but wickedly
pleasurable all the same.
The Paris événements
of 1968 nearly brought down a government and remain one of the defining moments
of postwar history. They began, however, as a cinéphiles' demonstration,
protesting against the dismissal from the Cinémathèque Française
of its creator, Henri Langois, by another numinous figure, De Gaulle's Minister
of Culture, André Malraux. And among the casualties of this mini-revolution
was the 1968 Cannes Festival, which was closed down by the combined efforts
of Truffaut, Godard and other cinéastes. It is therefore surprising how
relatively little attention the cinema has given to this episode in French history.
In the year of les événements, the British Marxist Maurice Hatton
tagged on to his movie Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition a coda in which his
naive British left-wing activist goes to Paris during the May riots and finds
himself reeling in a situation so alien to his ineffectual life. But although
there have been odd scenes in French movies briefly depicting their characters'
reactions to Paris in 1968, it took more than 20 years for Louis Malle, one
of the directors who helped close down Cannes, to make the first major response
to these events, his 1989 satirical comedy, Milou en mai. The year before that
the British writer Gilbert Adair published his novel The Holy Innocents, which
drew on his experiences as a student in Paris at the time.
A brilliant critic, pasticheur and aphorist, Adair is one of those Scots who
have bypassed English metropolitan culture and have become very much at home
in the French literary and intellectual tradition. He invites us to see Alain-Fournier's
Le Grand Meaulnes and Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles as his book's predecessors.
His novel and Malle's film are complementary. Both satirise the response of
self-absorbed radical-chic middle-class folk to the disturbances of May 1968,
Milou en mai centring on mostly middle-aged bourgeoisie in the countryside,
the novel concerning a trio of young people in Paris.
Adair has now adapted The Holy Innocents for the screen as The Dreamers, and
as his novel is about politics, transgressive sex and the cinema itself, he
has found a perfect collaborator in Bernardo Bertolucci. As in Le Grand Meaulnes,
a romantic innocent stumbles into an entrancing new world; as in Les Enfants
Terribles, a brother and sister live in a hermetic world of incestuous self-absorption.
The innocent is Matthew (played by Michael Pitt, a Leonardo DiCaprio type),
a 19-year-old American in Paris, studying film and going nightly to the Cinémathèque.
The brother and his slightly younger sister are Théo (Louis Garrel) and
Isabelle (Eva Green), the intense, chain-smoking, precociously intellectual
children of a poet, once left-wing, now detached from politics. Oblivious to
the gathering storm outside, they talk about films, debating the merits of Chaplin
and Keaton, and playing games that become increasingly dangerous. With great
dexterity, clips from films are worked into the narrative, as when the trio
set out to break the record of running through the Louvre established by Anna
Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur in Godard's Bande à part. They
celebrate Matthew's acceptance into their household by chanting 'you are one
of us' in the manner of the circus folk in Freaks. In his novel (which he has
recently rewritten), Adair is explicit about incest and bisexuality. The movie
deliberately turns the former into a deeply intimate, unconsummated affinity,
and the latter into gestures and glances. When at Théo's insistence Matt
becomes Isabelle's lover, they are shown to be virgins.
Two films not mentioned in The Dreamers, because they weren't made until the
Seventies, are Oshima's Ai No Corrida and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris,
which have similar, if less playful stories of people withdrawing into private
worlds to pursue perverse sexual pleasure. In all three the characters' moral
and physical deterioration points towards death. But from this morbid conclusion
The Dreamers is diverted by the intrusion of outside events. In a somewhat unsatisfactory
climax, the trio take to the streets and Isabelle and Théo throw themselves
with violent abandon into the vanguard of the rioting students, while the liberal
Matthew looks on aghast. We've been prepared for this by the portraits of Mao
pinned up beside pictures of Dietrich, and the reproduction of Delacroix's Liberty
Guides the People on which Théo and Isabelle have superimposed the face
of Marilyn Monroe. This is a perverted take on what Charles Péguy meant
when he said: 'Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.'
The Dreamers is not as poised as Adair's novel, which comments on life, art
and politics with a dry, aphoristic wit that makes one think of Voltaire, James
or Wilde. But it's an amusing, sophisticated movie, true to its times, cheerfully
erotic, and played with unselfconscious conviction by its three young actors.
A whirl of sensuality,
youth and rebellion set in Paris during the riots of 1968, Bernardo Bertolucci's
new film "The Dreamers" is ablaze with poetry and danger, and suffused
with an odd kind of intellectual kitsch.
Bertolucci has taken his story from a memoir by Gilbert Adair about a French-American
menage a trois, three 20-ish kids who meet as devotees ("rats") of
Paris' renowned film library/museum, the Cinematheque Francaise. The trio --
French twins Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel) and American Matthew
(Michael Pitt of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") -- meet as the '68 demonstrations
are breaking out and soon are enmeshed in their own private last apocalyptic
tango.
As we watch, author Adair and auteur Bertolucci fashion a movie in which sex,
cinema and revolution are as dangerously entwined as the dreamers themselves.
For better or sometimes worse, "The Dreamers" is quintessential Bertolucci.
With his old mastery of sensual images and erotic tension, the director of "The
Last Emperor" and "Last Tango in Paris" re-creates the worldwide
youth rebellion of the '60s -- a time in which politics, protest, pop culture
and sex all fused into an alternative world often seemingly on the brink of
explosion.
Like his most famous work "Last Tango," "The Dreamers" is
about sex as a delusory refuge from the violent world outside -- a chaos that
ultimately breaks through the windows. It's a sexier movie than "Tango,"
too, more explicit and graphic -- it earned an NC-17 rating -- though the times
have so changed since 1973, it's nowhere near as shocking.
Here, Isabelle and Theo are familiar Bertolucci types: very spoiled children
of privilege and the French literary world. Their father, like Bertolucci's,
is a famous poet, their mother a British intellectual. And Matthew is a movie-loving
Yank whose posture is droopy but whose DiCaprio-esque face glows with naive
idealism and head-over-heels love for his new pals. After the parents leave
Paris for a while, Isabelle and Theo draw him increasingly into their semi-incestuous
fantasy world and provocative games.
The background for all this, glimpsed in pieces, is the famous "semi-revolution,"
which began at the Cinematheque when minister of culture Andre Malraux tried
to sack Cinematheque's aging but legendary founder and director, Henri Langlois
(for bureaucratic carelessness), arousing much of France's cinema elite to protest.
That fight flared into a series of leftist strikes and street battles around
France that, for some awestruck young cinephiles, presaged possible worldwide
revolution.
Most of "Dreamers," however, takes place not in the streets -- among
the rioters, riot police, tear gas canisters and Molotov cocktails we sporadically
see -- but upstairs in bathrooms and boudoirs, where Isabelle and Theo taunt
and tease Matthew, twining together nude in Isabelle's bed.
For the threesome, as well as their creators, sex and the movies are life: brief,
incandescent, less threatening than the battles in the streets. They play movie
games based on Dietrich and Garbo movies and Howard Hawks' "Scarface,"
with sexual forfeits for wrong answers, and they re-enact moments from Godard
movies, including the breathless race though the Louvre in "Bande a Part."
Locked in their cul-de-sac above the fray, their passions for love and movies
fuse, and Bertolucci frequently intercuts black-and-white images from cinema
past with their feverish, colored '68 present.
Yet they also want danger. And, more and more, as Paris bursts onto riot and
flames, the fire draws them out. The situation suggests Cocteau's and Melville's
"Les Enfants Terribles," but "The Dreamers'" mood is closer
to "Tango" minus that movie's sense of existential dread. The three
leads, especially Green, are stunningly attractive, though only Pitt dredges
up much depth of character. Yet if there's something silly and perverse in the
erotic tangle we see -- spoiled, lazy or arrogant kids playing their brains
out while Paris burns -- it's not really because Bertolucci misrepresents the
times. Au contraire. He and Adair remember them well. And even though they use
Edith Piaf's anthem "Je ne regrette rien" under the credits, it's
not, perhaps, without a few regrets of their own.
"The Dreamers" is so naked and unguarded, I can't imagine it not inspiring
both derision and affection in audiences. Still, it's a movie so physically
beautiful and ardent that it can make you fall in love or lust against better
judgment. I loved a lot of it, lusted after some. Returning us sensuously to
the past, "The Dreamers" reminds us how much of that past still lives
in the present.
The state of cinephilia
Sadly enough, these very film s quoted by the director and his characters are
still regarded with the same passion and an almost-religious respect, which
means that during the last 40 years, there haven't been that many pictures that
were able to rival them.
Fully intentional or not, The Dreamers conceals in its heart a powerful mise-en-abîme,
a statement on the actual identities of two cinemas, which is established through
the characters' incarnations. Pitt, with his good looks, his innocence and his
attachment to values symbolizes American cinema-and I mean traditional and classic
American cinema not summer flicks. He is pure, curious, ready to experiment,
passionate about other European film culture in which he draws his own inspiration.
Garrel represents the cerebral facet of French cinema, highly cultivated, dark
& beautiful, pretentious and perverted. As for Green, she obviously embodies
the sexual side of French cinema, a gorgeous femme fatale generous with her
body. It is therefore not a coincidence that they are twins since they are the
2 inseparable sides of the same entity. After their contact, Pitt will be corrupted,
but in the end, he will survive the experiment without losing his identity.
As the three protagonists engage in passionate conversations about Godard, Charles
Chaplin, Buster Keaton and westerns, the movie shows how complementary and intertwined
American and French film cultures are, while undoubtedly remaining on almost
opposite poles.
Eroticism
If The Dreamers can be defined as a shrine to cinema, Bertolucci has also built
his film as a sanctuary of sex. Fellow filmmaker Tinto Brass (Caligula, All
Ladies Do It) often found erotic inspiration in the city of Venice, assimilating
the closed and isolated city to an alcove, propitious to the games of pleasure-see
The Key. Following the same concept, Bertolucci has found his own alcove in
the heart of Paris, and the obscure apartment is the alcove within the alcove,
just like in the Last Tango in Paris. One therefore won't be surprised to see
that the ultimate act of sex, the threesome that will happen off-screen, will
take place in a tent set inside the apartment, the third and most intimate alcove,
sheltering them from the rules of the society. All three-charismatic-actors
offer their bodies to the screen without restraint, but the filmmaker manages
to preserve the beauty of the act, creating eroticism-with a parsimonious dose
of provocation-rather than vulgarity. This also allows Pitt to confirm his image
as a talented and edgy actor who takes risks, logically following his participation
in Larry Clark's sulfurous Bully. And since we're talking about Larry Clark,
one will notice the hypocrisy of the MPAA that allows the erotically- charged
work of an Italian director to be released unrated in the US, while Larry Clark's
Ken Park still hasn't been greenlit to reach our screens. While both films feature
threesomes between teenagers, it looks like it is more accepted when it happens
far away, in "the old Europe", unless sex among teenagers never happens
in the U.S.
Politics & revolutions
For the neophytes, the film takes place during the May 68 Paris events, the
film showing the sexual and political revolution in parallel, which is the weakest
attempt of the picture. The Dreamers opens with a cultural protest in reaction
to the firing of the president of the French cinematheque, but then slightly
slides into political commentary, mostly through the Garrel character. By the
end of the film, when the Paris riots erupt, the international audience might
be confused, thinking the two protests might be linked as the student and communist
roots of the insurrection are not clearly explained. In the end, when Pitt's
character leaves the apartment to go back to the real world, he knows he's been
experiencing a moment which is unique. So do we.
©
Keswick Film Club 2003-04
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