In the opening scene of Bernardo Bertolucci’s new movie “The Dreamers” the camera follows a young man as he strolls towards Paris’ Cinémathèque. He certainly can’t be French: his trousers are cut too short and reveal the incongruity of his white socks. A couple of beats and a voiceover begins: “Only the French would dream of putting a cinema in a palace.” The thinking is being done by Matthew (Michael Pitt), a wide-eyed young American, whose suburban truisms are about to be blown to smithereens.
The “when” is May, 1968, and as British writer Gilbert Adair — who adapted “The Dreamers” from his novel “The Holy Innocents” — eloquently puts it: “There was a sense of springtime and of waking up: Paris in the spring, a political springtime, and the springtime of the flesh.” Adair who like Bertolucci was in Paris at the time of the student insurrection, was one of the so-called “rats de la Cinémathéque, those who arrive for the 6:30 performance and rarely leave before midnight.” For Adair it was the dismissal of the Cinémathéque’s founding father and director Henri Langlois that lit the fuse of the subsequent riots. “It was the first time young people actually opposed the state with any measure of success because Langlois was eventually given back his job,” says he.
For Matthew, his first wake up call is the sight of a beautiful young woman, flirting with him as she pretends to be chained to the front gates of the Cinémathèque, which is now closed for business. The girl is Isabelle (Eva Green) and she along with her mutually dependent twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel) seduce Matthew into the idea of moving in with them while their parents are away on holiday.
“Matthew has just arrived in France to start his studies. He has grown up in a San Diego suburb, had a childhood without any problems, a nice sort but naive. Pretty much a hippy,” says Pitt (last seen in “Hedwig” and the “Angry Inch”). It’s really in Paris that he’s going to wake up, if you like liberate himself, by having contact with the two teenagers he meets and who are going to corrupt him. Perhaps they don’t exactly open his eyes for him; perhaps they simply give him the right to open them!”
Cue a movie, which cleverly plays on the inherent political differences of young French and American “bourgeois” radicals. In one telling scene Matthew and Theo are sitting in the bathtub together discussing the Vietnam War, which in 1968 was at its apogee. Matthew speaks of having friends who were compelled to join up while he was lucky enough to have escaped to Paris. He tells Theo that unlike him, he (Matthew) can’t rage against the war with the same pent-up idealism because he cares about his friends however misdirected their fight in Vietnam might be.
In another scene Matthew goads Theo about his armchair bound political beliefs. Plastered around Theo’s room are posters of so-called freedom fighters like Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, he (Theo) even likes to read aloud from Chairman Tung’s little red book. “You should be out there where the action is” says Matthew, or words to that effect, “but all you do is sit in here (the apartment) and drink expensive red wine.” Theo’s reaction is to try and strangle the very life out of Matthew. Later the trio’s bizarre reverie is at last broken by a brick through the window which has them scuttling out into the street light like so many rats abandoning a sunken ship.
Culturally also, Theo and Matthew are constantly at odds: Theo prefers Clapton and Chaplin, Matthew would rather have Hendrix and Keaton any day. Both are bound as is Isabelle by their love of movies. Throughout, the three of them play a cinema trivia-based game with a sexual forfeit as the loser’s prerogative. It’s a great excuse for Bertolucci to indulge his own love of film, expertly inter-cutting the action with scenes from old movies like “Bande à part,” “Queen Christina” and “Freaks.” Of the 1960s the 63-year-old Italian director says: “I’d say we all lived a fantasy. Cinema, politics, jazz, rock and roll, sex, philosophy, drugs, were all in the melting pot. I devoured everything in a state of permanent overdose.”
“The Dreamers,” Bertolucci’s third film to be set in Paris after “The Conformist” (1970) and “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), isn’t quite as graphically explicit as Adair’s novel, in that homosexuality and incest are only hinted at as opposed to blankly stated. It is though an uncommonly sexy movie and as Bertolucci puts it: “a reminder like an air of music or a burst of sunlight that there was a time when an entire generation woke up, their heads brimful with crazy hope. It’s perhaps while listening to young people today speaking so negatively about the future that I wanted to remind them of a time when the future looked so bright. Some talk about May ’68 as though it was a lost war. That’s absolutely wrong, I think we witnessed some real upheavals but we blotted out that memory. It’s no doubt the reason why parents don’t speak to their children about what went on. A black hole has been dug, nourished by their silence. Young people today are unaware of that whole period, it’s as if we succeeded in censoring the spirit of the times. That’s nuts. Even if revolutionary dreams got broken, May ’68 played a crucial part in changing people’s attitudes. Nothing would ever be the same again. Imagine in Italy at that time lovers kissing in public were shouted at. A lot of those young people who today take their pseudo-liberty for granted have no idea what they owe to May ’68.”
It is all the more regrettable then as Bertolucci recently admitted that his latest film will be cut for its release in the United States. Several explicit scenes look likely to be edited to qualify the film for an R-rating in the States by its American distributor Fox Searchlight. “The film risks coming out amputated, mutilated in the United States.” said an angry Bertolucci at this year’s Venice film festival. “What’s going on there in America?” Bertolucci was heard to say. Over three decades earlier people were asking the very same question, only on that occasion it was: “What’s going on there in France?” Out Dec 10
