The Dreamers
a film by Brenardo Bertolucci
written by Gilbert Adair
The new film from Bernardo Bertolucci continues his forty-year trajectory of exploring the boundaries of cinematic story-telling and pushing himself to do more. Although the current experiment is not entirely successful, and not up to the level of his finest work - yet it has some very telling moments, and even the flawed work of a serious master-craftsman like Bertolucci is interesting and provocative.
The dreamers of the title are three young people, in the last of their "teen" years who frequent the Cinematheque Francaise - a unique national film theater where the whole range of international film art, from silent classics to Golden Age films to "B-Movies"was regularly screened in the 1950s and 60s.
Bertolucci compares films to dreams, his protagonists and their companions in the movie audience - including ourselves? - to dreamers, and then extends the metaphor to include the social/political visionaries that so many people seemed to become around the world in the late 1960s - and in few places more clearly and confrontationally than in Paris in 1968.
The film begins with a sequence of young Matt - an American in Paris - hurrying to a screening at the Cinematheque and ends with a sequence of his friends rushing to hurl a molotov cocktail into the streets - and with the police reprisals that follow. In a voice-over commentary at the start of the film, Matt refers to life "bursting through the screen." This is the experience into which Bertolucci apparently intends to draw us.
But his leading characters are not yet ready to be drawn in. Holding the world at bay with Matt are the twins, Theo and Isabelle, the spoiled children of bourgeois intellectual parents whose self-indulgent, adolescent psychology appears to verge on the pathological. They've created a world of their own out of images from film and a complicated trope on their sexuality, and into it they invite the naive - and rather fascinated- Matt.
Isabelle and Theo seek to impress and intimidate Matt with their casual approach toward nudity and sex, their knowledge of film and their blase attitude regarding the world around them. Matt is attracted and intrigued by these young people, so different from him, and enticed by the sexual energy of the situation - but he doesn't quite know what to make of it all.
What emerges is a psychological drama of self-discovery that plays out against the background of the upheavals of national self-discovery that the 1968 actions in Paris represented. Bertolucci seems to be drawing a parallel between the unreality, the claustrophobic, adolescent self-absorption of his three young protagonists and their awakening into the real events around them, and the "awakening" of social and political consciousness in 1968.
Matt meets Isabelle and Theo at a mass demonstration to protest the closing of the Cinematheque and the firing of its visionary director Henri Langlois (a real event whose documentary footage of Jean-Pierre Leaud then is intercut with shots of him today acting out a recreation of the original event).
But Isabelle and Theo are not really protestors - they are not politically conscious at all. They are just playing at it. When Matt asks Isabelle why she is chained to the gates, she giggles and shows him that she is only pretending by quickly shedding the heavy chains she has wrapped around her wrists.
This attitude is reflected in their fascination with cinema - another world of make-believe. They amuse themselves by acting out favorite scenes from films. They watch the unfolding of the real, political struggle only on television, or looking down from the balcony of their parents' apartment on the ebb and flow of demonstrators and police. They are literally "above it all."
But their childish resistance to real involvement is an untenable position. Their relationship is based on a kind of imitation of adult life that is ultimately unsustainable (they run out of the money their parents have left them). The attitude of indifference they affect and their fumbling sexual experiments can't distract them from the demands of the world around them. Total self- destruction seems the only defense left. And eventually life does, indeed come bursting in on them.
Bertolucci views their situation with the nostalgic and avuncular eye of someone looking back on the follies and melodrama his own youth. William Blake said "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," and that might be a fitting epigraph for what Bertolucci is trying to communicate here.
In the first place, he celebrates the unquenchable spirit of youth - the sexual awakening, the intellectual challenge, the energy, the imagination - and its resilience - the ability to make mistakes and sometimes survive them - sometimes even rise above them.
Then he creates an implicit analogy between the personal turmoil of adolescence and the collective turmoil of the 1968 events. The film ends up as a bittersweet, honestly critical but ultimately loving and hopeful assessment of the idea of the awkward, fitful progress of human consciousness, both individual and social.
There are clues along the way. There is the comment about life "bursting through the screen." In an early scene, Matt is distracted from the intellectual pretensions of Isabelle's and Theo's father's pontification by a spontaneous meditation on how Œin a cosmic way, everything is related to everything else.
There is the labyrinthine apartment - the maze that the hero must conquer and from which he must eventually find his way out. There is Matt's bathtub monologue on the voyeuristic nature of cinema - demonstrating its point on one level while expounding it on another. There is the siren song of sexuality and there are the sirens of the police cars in the streets.
Bertolucci's approach here is nebulous and suggestive rather than specific. He's not creating an allegory, but rather a dream - and extended, extra-rational metaphor to try to express the "way things fit together" in his recollection and his creative imagination. While this is a daring approach, it is so personal that it is bound to be unsuccessful in some degree for most viewers. But Bertolucci has never been one to shy away from the risky experiment or hold back for fear of failure.
It is a bold undertaking that requires almost perfect execution to succeed fully. Unfortunately, he undercuts his efforts by the casting and the performances. His young actors are not able to convincingly capture the nexus of adolescence of youth and adulthood they are called upon to represent.
Sexuality - such a dominant obsession of adolescent experience - is central to the story, and the ability of the characters to convey the mix of excitement and terror, of curiosity and confusion, of bravado and insecurity that are so characteristic of the adolescent experience of sex is key. Bertolucci went so far as to accept an NC-17 rating - which means that many mainstream, multi-plex theaters will not even consider the film for display - in order to be able depict the sexuality with the graphic frankness he felt the story required.
But by casting actors who are older than the characters they are portraying, Bertolucci subverts his efforts to promote a sense of realism. Their innocence often seems forced and false, and their fumbling, embarrassed explorations ingenuous. This is partly the fault of the actors - they are only a few years older than their characters, and some older actors have played teenagers with great skill - but Bertolucci cast these actors for their roles, and he has to take some responsibility as well.
Michael Pitt, who plays Matt, does quite well as the unsophisticated American. His slightly vacant stare and dreamy vagueness conveys the character's lack of self-awareness. But in key moments, he seems like an actor trying to sell the character's enthusiasm rather than inhabiting it.
Eva Green, who plays Isabelle, captures the character's self-conscious strangeness and her melodramatic streak, but can't quite pull off the vulnerability that lies under Isabelle's play-acting. She seems too mature and sophisticated for the role, and the sexual games that she plays - instead of seeming "naughty" in a childish way, as they ought to - feel embarrassingly perverse - a grown-up playing at being a child.
Louis Garrel as Theo is the most assured of the three. But that very assurance plays against the insecurity that is clearly written into the part. It comes across as a kind of maturity, and Theo becomes confusing as he joins in the action - Garrel's embodiment makes his participation seem patronizing and condescending rather than conspiratorial.
The three had a very difficult task - the film, written by Gilbert Adair who also wrote the wonderful Love and Death on Long Island, demands a great deal of them. That they are not quite equal to the task is disappointing, but they are to be credited for trying hard and acquitting them selves as well as they have - for in spite of these failures, the film is quite rewarding.
There is far more in this film to enjoy that there is that is disappointing. Bertolucci has come a long way since the raw, guerilla feel of The Conformist. The camera work, that mixes smooth tracking shots, ingenious angles and languid stationary set-ups with hand-held and documentary sequences, is practiced and adept. The sets - primarily the magical cave of an apartment, which is practically a character in the story - are beautifully arranged and lit.
In some ways that technical polish is a good thing, although in some ways the raw energy of some of his earlier films is one thing that is lacking here - but that's another sub-text of the this film - that we grow and change. We mature, develop and learn - or fail to learn - whether we want to or not. Life bursts through the screen. We respond as well as we are able.
This is not Bertolucci's best film - he has made some real masterpieces - but it is still a valiant and accomplished effort, and a film that has a lot to say.
But that's just my opinion. What's yours? Let me know.z