The Dreamers
review by Cynthia Fuchs, 6 February 2004

Hot Voodoo

During the first moments of The Dreamers, American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) finds love at the Cinémathèque Française. The camera pans over the audience, light from the screen spilling over their upturned faces. And what is movie that so enthralls them? Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, a film that not only inspired the Nouvelle Vague, but also brilliantly challenged U.S. political institutions and moral presumptions.

However, following this first scene, Shock Corridor is disappeared from The Dreamers, its famous excesses -- its indictments of U.S. racism and sexism, the war against North Korea, the newspaper business, and psychiatry -- lost in a shuffle of other excesses (which have led to the film's NC-17 rating). And while these will not be surprising for viewers who know something about Bernardo Bertolucci, neither will they challenge anything resembling the status quo. The latest movie from the director of Last Tango in Paris is all about reaffirming wistful memories of a place and time -- Paris, May 1968 -- when revolution seemed possible and worthy, even if the crass commercialists and cynics have long since won out. The frustration of The Dreamers lies in its easy lapsing into such unimaginative nostalgia, as if recalling the moment is enough: no questions need be asked, of participants, observers, or chroniclers.

Matthew's personal revolution tends to obscure the student demonstrations of 1968, because, the film suggests, he's a kid -- sensitive, smart, cinephilically inclined -- who's distracted by immediate gratifications. (This following the minute when he's drawn to the student protests and speeches by film professors and Cinémathèque curator Henri Langlois, as well as the exhortations of Jean-Pierre Léaud himself, only, of course, considerably older than he was back then.) Matthew's more captivating objects of affection arrive in the form of twins Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). These crass French kids see the foreigner as an object for their own game-playing, and so they gambol on Parisian streets, accompanied by the soundtrack to The 400 Blows, in love with the spring weather, the future stretching before them, each other, and themselves.

The idea -- or better, the image -- of the twins surely resonates with the sort of self-involvement that The Dreamers proceeds to investigate, but these kids are so languid and lovely, so immersed in each other as reflected images, that they also pose a risk and seduction for the naïve and intense American. And so, they invite him inside. First, he enters their home, specifically, the classically lovely apartement where they live with their bored-seeming, sophisticated mother (Anna Chancellor) and poet dad (Robin Renucci). At first Matthew is enchanted by the dinner table "philosophical speculating," Isabelle and Théo smoking ceaselessly, he in black turtleneck, but of course. Matthew even imagines himself quick enough to step in, regarding the ways that all lines intersect and all things connect -- Matthew is surprised to learn that the performance he thought was solidly smart and entertaining has only bored Isabelle and Théo. His perspective apparently needs some adjustment, and he's all too willing to shift -- or go through the motions of shifting -- in order to impress his new friends.

When the parents leave for a month's vacation, the kids hole up together, immersing themselves in dense discussions of the relative merits of Hendrix and Clapton, or Keaton and Chaplin. By way of increasingly heavy-handed illustration, the film repeatedly reveals the sources of their potentially clever allusions, as well as having the kids name the films in question. Thus, Isabelle brings up Jean Seberg in Breathless, and the film shows that; she performs a scene from Blonde Venus and the film shows that (the memorable Dietrich in a gorilla suit scene). Rarely does The Dreamers trust its audience to grasp a reference -- all are spelled out, such that any deeper context -- what movies meant in the '60s, for the Cahiers du Cinema and others, how movies intersected with sexual or political revolutions -- is laid out like a roadmap, ironically leaving little room for viewers' own "dreaming."

As a surrogate viewer, Matthew provides simultaneous judgment of and seduction by the twins, whose "corruption" is suggested in their incestuous intimacy (they never quite sleep together on screen, though Matthew's erect penis is shown, as he serves as mediating lover for the siblings). Once he proves himself able to keep up -- literally, during a run through the Louvre emulating the one enacted by the three youngsters in Godard's Bande à Part -- Matthew finds himself accepted. This moment is underlined by cuts to Tod Browning's Freaks, as Isabelle and Théo chant, "One of us, one of us." Got it.

This thematic interest in the ways that movies reflect and also shape lived experience is exacerbated by the kids' sexual experimenting. The camera lingers on their exquisite, lithe bodies - bodies that plainly haven't spent much time outside the privileged existence the film depicts -- in ways that are not so much shocking as they are deferential and, after a while, redundant. Matthew unknowingly deflowers Isabelle (girls losing various forms of virginity being a favorite topic of Bertolucci's), the boys gaze longingly and also competitively on one another, and Isabelle begins to unravel.

This last may be this unoriginal film's least interesting lift: the crazed young girl, driven over a series of edges by cruel young men (Théo is obviously selfish and angry, Matthew is only self-absorbed enough not to look out for her very carefully). Isabelle's increasingly self-destructive tragedy doesn't reveal anything you haven't seen or thought of before, especially if you have even a passing familiarity with the array of films cited by The Dreamers.

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