The DreamersAdapted from Gilbert Adair's novel, The Holy Innocents, The Dreamers revels in "the incorrigible voluptuousness of Bertolucci's style" (Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema), and is shot through with the then sixty-something director's nostalgia for a time that seemed immensely ripe with political and cultural revolutionary fervour.
Bertolucci's 'dreamers' come together when Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American visiting Paris for the first time to immerse himself in the cinephile culture of the Cinematheque Francaise (just as Bertolucci did), befriends a self-consciously coquettish young Parisian, Isabelle (Eva Green) and her brooding, handsome twin brother, Theo (Louis Garrel). Cocooned inside the Paris apartment conveniently vacated by the twins' parents, the trio soon escalate from film buff gamesmanship into erotic interplay and experimentation.
In the outside world, political currents unleased in the February '68 protests against the French government's attempted removal of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinematheque have escalated into broader dissatisfaction. As the May '68 riots begin to gather momentum on the streets of Paris, the trio retreat further into their splendid isolation - a reality Bertolucci stunningly intrudes upon when a brick thrown from the street outside literally shatters their idyll and shakes them into renewed consciousness.
Bertolucci invests The Dreamers with a palpable exhilaration, from a wonderful shot-by-shot recreation of the scene in which the trio in Godard's Bande a Part (1964) run through the Louvre - Matthew, Isabelle and Theo 'beat' the filmic trio's record by 17 seconds - to a risqué act of devotion enacted by Theo kneeling prostate in front of a poster of Dietrich in Von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932).
"The mainstay of the film is passion.and Bertolucci captures the mood beautifully" - Urban Cinefile
