Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle spend much of the film lounging around the flat, naked or nearly naked, debating Maoism, quoting Cahiers du Cinema, and amusing themselves with fleeting pantomimes and tableaux of famous movie scenes. And in this world, replete with decrepit walls, posters of various ideologues and campaigns, and an eclectic assortment of statues, records, and discarded wine bottles, the characters can escape the repressive mores of society and into an Eden of their own construction.įor many viewers, however, the world that Bertolucci constructs seems to be one, not of beauty and refinement, but of stale ostentation and threadbare cliché. As the twins, whose parents have left on summer holiday, invite Matthew into their world, we as the audience are gradually drawn in with him. In the penthouse where the trio squander their days, the scenes are inculcated with a saccharine sentimentality and a muted, ethereal beauty. Indeed, the film is exceedingly beautiful. And it is in this dissonance–between the power of ideas and the sterile, indulgent lives of those who hold them–that the true beauty of the film shines through. Despite the turbulent, historic backdrop of the film, however, Bertolucci largely ignores the rioters instead, the camera’s gaze is directed toward the three characters who, despite professing an ostensible solidarity with the ideals of the revolution, increasingly withdraw into a sequestered and sybaritic world of their own creation. The film, set amidst the popular riots that swept through Paris in 1968, follows the hedonistic sojourn of three young cinéastes: Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American studying in France, and Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), a set of Parisian twins whom Matthew meets and befriends at the Cinémathèque Française. One of the most undervalued films of the last twenty years is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), a masterfully wrought picture that serves, in equal parts, as a panegyric on the power of cinema and a warning to those who abandon that power in pursuit of pure aesthetics. The Dreamers (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003)
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