Review: The Dreamers (2003)
Y tu mamá tambien
The Dreamers (2003)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
I had to order a DVD of this movie in order to see it, and thus had to wait more than a week to begin writing about it, so I couldn’t review it in tandem with the last film reviewed, “Summer Palace.” While they’re from different continents and different eras, the two films have a lot in common. In each, university students toy with each other and have lots of sex, while outside the door, and outside their windows, all the other students are engaged in a historical struggle — one that is as much against the adults and what they’ve done with the world as it is against the political-economic system that protects and enriches them.
Spoiler: both revolts end badly.
Both films are also about dreamy obsession, a pursuit of a state of love where the characters hope to find salvation but which remains frustratingly out of reach. In “Summer Palace,” Yu Hong seeks fulfillment first by making an intense friendship with a girl on her dorm floor, and then through an obsessive sexual affair with an older student, Zhou Wei. Submerging herself in her journal, in which she describes the real affair in exaggerated terms and flowery language, she exists in a kind of dream state. You get the feeling that she wants never to wake up from the dream, because it’s only there that she really achieves the depth of feeling she wants. The affair expires before she reaches this nirvana, so she tries again with each successive lover, becoming more cynical but lacking any alternative method for gaining the love she seeks.
The scope of “The Dreamers” is much smaller, transpiring over only a few months, but these are the months of May 68 — a phrase which became not only a reference to the unique and romantic period of student revolt in Paris, but also, as time went on, acquired a bitterness, a sense of duende. This happened because after less than ten years its principals lost their heroic status and the changes which the students struggled to achieve proved effervescent, as France and the rest of the West, from Germany to Japan, were lulled into consumerism and the same bourgeois life which the students of Paris had specifically rejected and tried to escape from.
The films of Jean-Luc Godard are highly informative of this era of change. In “Masculin Feminin” (1966), Godard depicted young people in the first fresh months of adulthood and at the crossroads of exactly the alternative futures that real French youths would face just a few years later. A title card reads:
THIS FILM COULD BE CALLED
THE CHILDREN OF MARX AND COCA-COLA
UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU WILL
And shortly after “Masculin-Feminin” — a movie which feels comparatively light and entertaining compared to later Godard works — Godard made “La Chinoise” (1967), in which… well, let’s just quote IMDB: “A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.” While lacking in narrative thrust, the movie once again deftly captures the mood of France’s younger generation: In love with the idea of revolution but marooned in the bourgeois class of their birth, their particular revolutionary struggle is to free themselves from privilege long enough to take action — a struggle which takes place in a nice apartment none of them could afford to pay for.
The fascination of the college generation of France in the mid 1960s with Maoism — repeated in the U.S. by factions of the Weather Underground and in West Germany by various would-be Communist parties in the early 1970s — always seemed strange to me, an American. Surely one could be against the Vietnam War (the main thing that young people were really rebelling against) while refraining from embracing the authoritarian regimes of China or the USSR. But to live in that middle ground was impossible for both the most romantic youths (who went to Cuba to harvest sugar cane) or the strictest ones (who formed revolutionary communes which mostly devolved into cults).
In any case, I missed all of it. I didn’t graduate from high school until 1974, a year after the Vietnam draft ended. By the time I got to college that fall, there was nothing left to protest against, and hippies had become irrelevant. Fortunately, sex still offered its own canvas upon which a form of revolution was still possible.
Anyway, in “The Dreamers,” the setting is Paris, early May 1968. Making this film 35 years later, Bernardo Bertolucci — a once highly creative director who, at his peak, made gorgeous films ranging from “The Conformist” (1970), “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), and “1900” (1976), decided to spend millions on recreating riots and other May 68 scenes at the film’s beginning and end, even though the movie happens mostly inside an extremely nice Parisian flat — again, the unaffordable apartment, paid for in this case by the characters’ parents, one of whom is apparently a famous, rich poet (?!?) — and, as in “Summer Palace,” the politics going on outside the window hardly touch the lovers inside.
The film is narrated in the beginning by an American visiting Paris for a year to study French. He’s played by Michael Pitt, an actor who has mostly specialized in rough roles — he starred as a boxer a couple years ago in “Day of the Fight,” a well-done indie feature — but here he is almost a waif, 24 years old and so beautiful he might have stepped out of a Chanel ad. Bertolucci seems to be forcing a comparison with Leonardo DiCaprio, but this only makes it seem like he failed to get Leo for the role and had to settle. As written, Pitt’s character Matthew is mostly a naïf who is also a film buff. Not a very worldly character.
With other members of the church of cinema, he haunts the Cinémathèque française, a museum-cum-temple of film. The emotional home of the French New Wave and its fascination with American B movies by the likes of Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, the Cinémathèque became, briefly, the scene of an early skirmish between the May 68ers and the police.
Just before Bertolucci stages this mêlée, Matthew is picked out of the crowd by a comely lass who is doing a performance.
Wearing a bright red beret and with a Galoise hanging from her lips, Isabelle (Eva Green) appears chained to the facility’s doors as a form of protest. But she isn’t really chained, as she quickly demonstrates. She hails her twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel) and the three of them run away when the police charge.
What made her pick Matthew out of the large crowd outside the doors of the closed museum? Also movie buffs, the twins had noticed him attending the nightly shows alone; “everyone,” Isabelle tells him, “is wondering who you are.” This is the first of the splashes of fantasy, sprinkled throughout the film, that strain credulity. Every single man had this experience in their 20s, going to a new place and hoping to be noticed somehow, and talked to, and every single one knows it doesn’t work this way but wishes it did. In fact, almost every movie that centers a romantic or even merely sexual couple begins like this: the girl speaks to the guy first and sets him at ease. Without this departure from real life, the movie cannot proceed.
In short order, Isabelle and Theo initiate Matthew into their somewhat mentally and emotionally unbalanced fantasy life, which their parents’ affluence gives them the funding and the space to live out. The brother and sister sleep naked with one another and by all appearances appear to be lovers, though it’s soon made clear that they don’t actually have sex; that’s one of the things Isabelle needs Matthew for. They also need someone as knowledgeable about films as they are in playing an impossibly difficult combination of movie trivia and truth or dare.
As Theo, Garrel is even more beautiful than Matthew, with an ass right off Michaelangelo’s David. More importantly, he’s a better actor, his face able to portray the complex flow of genuine emotion, neurotic fixations, and whatever mix of rage and shame that underlie his and Isabelle’s relationship. For Eva Green, this was her first film role, and as he did thirty years earlier with Maria Schneider in “Last Tango,” Bertolucci exploits her inexperience and has her do things which shocked her when she saw the finished film. (She didn’t go in blind; her mother, French actress Marlene Jobert, was well aware of Schneider’s experience and warned her about Bertolucci.) On set he was “manipulative;” the actors “wanted to please him.”1
But what remains in the film, aside from full nudity, isn’t nearly as shocking as the intense bits in “Last Tango;” all of the sex in “The Dreamers” has a sweetness that befits the characters’ youth.2
For all the incestuous and ménage à trois vibes, the film never shows sex between siblings, nor do the two men even come close to getting it on (see footnote 2). This is a disappointment, because the premise, the shot where Matthew first sees the twins sleeping nude together, and the constant sexual atmosphere all seem to demand it. Given that the hit Mexican film “Y tu mamá tambien,” with its explicit ménage à trois, came out before “The Dreamers” was shot, I find the failure to stage a threesome between these characters — or at least to include it in the movie, if that’s also among the cut footage — even harder to understand. My guess is just that Bertolucci wasn’t confident enough to add it to what ultimately got an NC-17 rating anyway.
Ultimately, the movie is a disappointment, promising what it can’t deliver — though the nude scenes featuring the kind of perfect, nearly angelic bodies (and minus the ridiculously over-defined abdominal muscles that are inescapable in movies today) are worth the price of admission. Similarly, the expensively-staged riot scenes at the beginning and end of the film seem irrelevant to the film’s main subject. How well this movie captured the zeitgeist of May 68 is something that only someone who was a youth in Paris at the time can say.
Instead of this exercise in nostalgia, I recommend the 1975 film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000,” a Swiss film by Alain Tanner that sweetly captures the disappointment of that generation with the results of their attempt at revolution. Now in their 30s, its characters live on a communal farm and teach their children on-site. It’s sweet, but without an obligation to pretty things up, depicting the realistic conflicts that erupt over the inevitable issues of who does chores, who works at an outside job to bring in cash, who acts responsibly and who doesn’t. There’s little talk of revolutionary goals, more about groceries. This vision of living in community is vital. Nothing’s perfect, but it may be the only path in the next years that will enable us to live at all.
The quotations are from this 2003 interview with Green: “Confessions of a Nervous Muse.” Neil Young’s Film Lounge, Dec. 30, 2003. https://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews/neil-youngs-film-lounge-eva-green-confessions-of-a-nervous-muse/
I say “what remains” because according to the interview just cited, the was a lot of experimentation on camera, including a sex scene between the men, so who knows what they all got up to in footage that wasn’t used. Nevertheless, the film got an NC-17 rating in the U.S.