Flak Magazine: Review of The Dreamers, 02.27.04

According to the MPAA, no one younger than 17 can see Michael Pitt's pimply ass as he simulates (or does he?) intercourse in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. This is the right decision, although for the wrong reason. No one younger than 17 should see this movie because they'll be bored out of their skulls. For all that it revels in the flesh, The Dreamers is a movie about youthful passion for ideas, which Bertolucci equates with youthful passion for, well, other youths. Yes, there are penises aplenty in this movie, but what really warrants the MPAA warning sticker is the characters' long-winded debate about Mao.

In this scantily plotted movie, the nattily dressed young American Matthew (Pitt) meets up with Gallic twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabel (Eva Green) at a legend-worthy protest at the Paris Cinematheque, during which filmmakers and aficionados gathered to register their complaint at the government's dismissal of that institution's leader.

It's 1968 and revolution is in the air, but rather than take to the streets, the trio take to the twins' parents' cavernous apartment, the fourth and by far sexiest star of this movie. If it's not a real location, I don't want to know any more than I want to know about Halle Berry's plastic surgery. Ensconced in the apartment, the trio embark on a series of destructive erotic games. They debate the merits of Chaplin vs. Keaton, Hendrix vs. Clapton, and when one of them fails to identify a vignette from a movie, the loser is forced to pay a penalty, generally a sexual one.

The Dreamers is the kind of movie only an old man could make. Bertolucci turns an affectionate eye on idealism, on youth, on youthful flirtation with fascism, on pleasures of the flesh. On "Dawson's Creek," Pitt's Henry enjoyed the kind of adolescence everyone is nostalgic for — football team, romance with a blonde bombshell — except, probably, the few dozen who lived it. In The Dreamers, he once again enacts the kind of life you wish for in your 20s: a life abroad, teeming with romance and the ready promise of sex.

Bertolucci's take is a fond one; he doesn't scoff at the trio and their passion for art and ideas. It's refreshing for a movie to takes ideas seriously, but how true is the portrait? Did the ideologues of this generation really take ideas so seriously, or did they just want to get high and get laid? There are young people alive now as afire with passion about their causes — the Strokes, Howard Dean, Wes vs. P.T. — but do they deserve such serious treatment? Or, after all is said and done, are they just a bunch of garrulous kids, their passion insufficient to capture the nomination for Dean? Either way, even the most passionate young intellectuals in the audience will struggle to identify with this trio, who live, breathe, eat and fuck philosophically.

With respect to all the sex, perhaps Gilbert Adair, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based, was able to make some point about blood ties between the protagonists. But Bertolucci isn't; the implied incest is just kind of gross and doesn't really advance the plot so much as leave you scratching your head. Furthermore, the movie demurs on one point: The male leads never get it on, and that feels false. No man, no matter what his rating on the Kinsey scale, would have failed, as Pitt's Matthew does, to bed Theo, who spends much of the movie naked save his green velvet blazer. Why does Bertolucci hesitate here, when he's already gone so far? At any rate, the sex is surprisingly incidental; it's more graphic than Hollywood convention allows, but it's so dressed up in philosophy that one would be hard-pressed to see it as simply prurient. Anyone hoping to get their jollies — particularly those NC'd 17-year-olds — will leave the cineplex sadly disappointed.

The Dreamers is not particularly well acted or well written, so it comes as a surprise that the movie itself is good — beautifully art-directed and with a pitch-perfect soundtrack. Though at times too nostalgic for lost idealism, the movie's conclusion strikes the perfect note: Theo — who, more than any of the trio, embodies the vogue for revolution amongst men and women who came of age in the 1960s — resorts to violence in the name of his beliefs. That's the lesson: When we leave the house, leave behind the (relatively) innocent nudity of Eden, humans turn to violence in the name of ideas. You don't have to go to the theater to glean this — just watch CNN — but it's more of a statement than you usually get at the movies.

— Rumaan Alam (rumaanalam@hotmail.com)