With his new movie, veteran Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci returns to the city he used in Last Tango in Paris (1972). But where that film staged a sexual tragedy of despair, The Dreamers investigates a youthful, innocently decadent sexuality that could stand at the start of the sort of tale that ends with the desperation and disgust of Last Tango in Paris. This new movie is, in a way, Bertolucci’s First Tango in Paris.
It is also a homage to cinema itself, almost an attempt to recapture the thrill of first falling in love with the movies. It is as though Bertolucci is trying, via this story, to re-ignite a love of cinema — something a movie director must surely possess, though sometimes one wonders.
Set in 1968, The Dreamers begins with a key moment in what became the ”évènements” of that year — the popular uprising that saw running battles in the streets of Paris and nearly brought down the government, if not perhaps the whole of European capitalism. And, amazingly, a key moment in that conflagration, the first hand-to-hand street battle, began at the Cinemethèque Française. That movie house was dedicated to showing what we today would call ”art movies” — the New Wave of French cinema as well as the American classics that helped inspire it.
It is probably impossible now, in a globalised culture where American trash has largely won the culture wars, to recapture the excitement generated by watching (and making) movies that brought together the urgent political and aesthetic concerns of the day. For the leaders of the New Wave, it might be said that aesthetics and politics were the same thing; and they were fomenting revolution.
When the Cinemathèque’s director, Henri Langlois, was ousted, for reasons obscure, by conservatives in the French government, the whole artistic left came out in support of him. Their protests at the Cinemethèque saw the first shots fired in what became the events of May 1968.
The Bertolucci who made Novecento (1976), a paean to communism, here joins the Bertolucci whose own work continued the New Wave revolution in cinema. And beside those Bertoluccis is the analyst of sexuality, here working from a slim, elegant novel by Gilbert Adair, who also wrote the script.
The sexual and, inevitably, emotional part of the storyline deals with three young people at the dawn of their lovelives — youths for whom sex is still a breathtakingly dangerous experiment.
They are the twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), into whose hot-house world wanders a young American, Matthew (Michael Pitt). Here Adair and Bertolucci are playing with antecedents such as Les Enfants Terribles and Jules et Jim, as well as with the Jamesian tradition that pits New World against Old Europe, innocence against experience. It is also an opposition neatly encapsulated in the debt of the New Wave to the half-forgotten bastard classics of the American cinema.
Theo, Isabelle and Matthew are all cinéphiles — people who, as Adair neatly puts it, look upon mere movie-goers the way fish must regard swimmers. Their lives and actions are framed by the movies they adulate. The Dreamers interpolates shots from movies as disparate as Shock Corridor, Blonde Venus and Breathless. The games Theo, Isabelle and Matthew play are movie games as much as sexual ones; for them, cinema and sex overlap.
Puzzlingly, perhaps, Bertolucci eschews the big cinematic ending of Adair’s novel, but that matters little. The whole thing works exhilaratingly — it’s so sexy, so cinematic. In what amounts to a comment on the American movie mainstream, The Dreamers is not just cut cut cut: languorously, sensuously, the camera moves, and we are moved. The Dreamers is also, most unusually, a movie in which it’s not just the bad guys who smoke.