The Dreamers

by Anna Pulley

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci 2003)

A kind of intellectual fetishism, The Dreamers is about sex, film and politics. The many threesomes this film espouses could fill the Bermuda Triangle. Starting with the three protagonists -- identical twins and a naive foreign exchange student they seduce, the triangulation between incest, revolution and art doesn't quite synch up, but it doesn't matter because The Dreamers is as crushing as it is transparent.

Matthew (Micheal Pitt) is an American student studying in Paris during the 1968 student riots. Though he doesn't get much studying done, he does get schooled by feckless twins Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel). The twins have a provocative relationship with each other, with Matthew and with the films that consume them. Eroticism, incest and escapism act as screens to protect the protagonists from the violence that surrounds them, as they increasingly leave their lavish apartment less and less. While the streets outside are rioting, our bourgie heroes debate about Hendrix and Keaton while taking a fucking bubble bath.

I'll admit I've had a thing for Michael Pitt ever since he played a hairless cherub on Dawson's Creek, and his role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (the dimples, the psuedo-goth band, it was all too much!) further endeared him to me. In The Dreamers, Pitt plays the innocent, doe-eyed film buff with a feverish, Marxist intensity. He falls in love with the brother-sister duo, thinking he is capable of breaking the incestuous link between them.

While Bertolucci certainly employs a mastery of erotically manicured direction, The Dreamers tends to comes across more as filmic masturbation, with references, reinactments and scenes from many of the classics interspersed throughout: Top Hat, Bande a part, Scarface, Queen Christina, etc. The political and sexual revolution that's supposed to be the backdrop to all the steamy sex these kids are having is, well, subsumed by all the steamy sex these kids are having. I don't want to compare explicit art house films to porn by any means, but the whole "revolution" shtick did seem particularly tacked on. Let it be a film that celebrates sensuality, an homage to great films, spoiled and lazy French hipsters (or le hipsters, as they're called in Francais), a youthful awareness that both heightens and crumbles under erotic and familial tenseness and an intellectual malaise propagated by a subtly narcissistic world view. But don't say it's about revolution unless you're going to add "in my pants" to that sentence.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get back to talking about the sex. Because it's incredible and I say that with all the pervyness I can muster AND all my delicate aesthetic sensibilities. This is not Showgirls, by any means, but it's not Last Tango in Paris either. Indeed, there's something blatantly un-erotic about the ways the characters relate to each other in childish, film trivia ways (sans clothes, of course). But the psychology of sex is rarely meant to titillate and Bertolucci knows that. Hence, the scene where Matthew and Isabelle lose their virginity to each other on a dare, with Theo in the background cracking eggs and seeming generally unperturbed, is saturated with debilitating desire as well as crass predictability. In the time it takes Theo to crack three eggs, the deed is done and he's reaching between Isabelle's legs to check for blood. Matthew, under the impression that Isabelle has had many lovers, is ignited with passion by the sight of her blood, (her offering?) and kisses her with a kind of sensual brutality that made me clap a little. It's one of the best sex scenes I've seen in a really long time. And for that alone, it's worth watching.