Bernardo Bertolucci – The Dreamers (2003) (HD)
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When Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay with them, what begins as a casual friendship ripens into a sensual voyage of discovery and desire in which nothing is off limits and everything is possible.
Quote:
Bertolucci’s most recent film The Dreamers revisits the defining moments of the director’s generation, the May 1968 riots in France, through its look at the erotically charged friendship of Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American film buff, and two sexually precocious French twins (Eva Green and Louis Garrel) who, after meeting at the Cinémathèque française, withdraw indoors while Paris ignites around them. (One is tempted to define this as the milieu of Partner, but for all that film’s nouvelle vague pretensions it was still set in Italy.) It’s a remarkable work coming from Bertolucci, not the least because the director manages to keep a surprisingly objective distance from ideological debate, despite the highly contentious setting. In earlier films, he had held up activism as an ennobling ideal, one his middle-class protagonists were desperate to live up to; here, the clearly bourgeois French twins (they are the children of a successful poet and an English mother) have no lack of ideological conviction. Indeed, it’s an American who provides the film’s conscience. At the end, in direct opposition to his comrades, Matthew rejects direct action, arguing against violence, and Bertolucci seems to side with him. It’s a complete turnaround from the man who made Partner, a paradox the film seems to acknowledge: the film ends with the American and the French children bitterly parting ways in the midst of a riot; the police begin charging, as the credits roll and the soundtrack plays Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien”.
That The Dreamers ends with its characters in the midst of a street riot is quite telling. Many of Bertolucci’s earlier works often climax with their protagonists among the masses, often in the midst of street parades and political demonstrations, as if to symbolise the charge of history. The isolation of the later works suggest that the characters have begun to exist outside history, perhaps understandable coming from a director whose social convictions had melted away with the end of the Cold War. Very significantly, the solitude of the kids in The Dreamers is punctured when a brick from the rioting outside smashes through the window of their house. One could almost say that it interrupts an idyll, but it also interrupts a suicide attempt (perhaps, in Bertolucci’s later films, the two are not so different). It’s a remarkable moment for the director’s cinema: an acknowledgement that, for all its comforts, the time for isolation may have come to an end. Indeed, one could see that brick as a challenge from the young Bertolucci to his older self – it may turn out to be the harbinger of a more politically engaged cinema from one of the most fascinating and gifted filmmakers of his, or any other, generation.
© Bilge Ebiri, September 2004
The.Dreamers.2003.RESTORED.1080p.BluRay.x264-CiNEPHiLiA.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 54 min
Size: 15.4 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x1038
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 17.7 Mb/s
BPP: 0.369
Audio
#1: English 5.1ch DTS @ 1 413 kb/s
#2: English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 106 kb/s (Commentary by Director Bernardo Bertolucci, Author/Writer Gilbert Adair, and Producer Jeremy Thomas)
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
