The Dreamers (2003)

2 years ago

The Dreamers (2003)

by Letitia Trent

Some movies try to out-real the real world - beautiful actors gain thirty pounds in order to fit into “regular people” clothes to play grocery store cashiers, prison inmates, or strippers, and whole blocks of Detroit, Memphis, Tulsa, or some other depressed urban area are hijacked to give a film some level of authenticity. I appreciate these kinds of movies, usually. That being said, my favorite kinds of movies create their own reality, one that exists outside of all real-world antecedents. Bernardo Bertollucci’s lovely and nostaligic film, The Dreamers, is the kind of movie that bears almost no resemblance to the real world, and it’s all the better for it.

The Dreamers is set in Paris during the summer of 1968, but the setting is hardly important to the story - Bertolluci spends the first few minutes of the movie framing the context of student riots, but quickly abandons the outside world for a few interiors of a Paris apartment building. Matthew (Michael Pitt) is an American student who spends most of his time alone at the Cinemateque Francais. He befriends fellow cinephiles - the teenage siblings Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrell) - who appreciate his love of Godard and old Hollywood films. When Theo and Isabelle’s parents leave for a short vacation, they invite the lonely American to stay with them. Three is company, though, and what seems at first like a nostalgic look at the late 60’s quickly turns into something far more interesting.

Pitt plays Matthew as an innocent - a wide-eyed and painfully polite American (a kind of American I’m sure Parisians wish to actually meet) - to contrast Green and Garrell’s twisted and incestuous Europeans. Green and Garrell are content to lounge around deshabille, drinking red wine from the bottle, listening to rock music, arguing about the merits of Keaton versus Chaplin, and playing semi-sadistic movie trivia games that generally end in somebody performing a sexual act as penance for losing. Matthew, like the viewer, is half-horrified, half-tittilated by the siblings. Also, like the viewer, Matthew is seduced by the impossible lifestyle that they represent - the dream of being young, beautiful, intoxicated by film and ideas, and left alone to create one’s own moral rules.

Green and Garrell play Isabelle and Theo as sly, menacing, and incredibly sexy. Their relationship to each other and Matthew revolves around domination and a love of fucked-up mind games. They are loving and affectionate, yet also unpredictable. Pitt, with his enormous blue eyes, mop of long, blonde hair and whispery voice, seems more feminine than Green, who pretty much steals the movie with her throaty and sexually charged performance as Isabelle. Garrell, who does a bit more moping and brooding than absolutely necessary, at least creates an interesting aesthetic contrast to Pitt’s pliable Matthew with his wild black hair and perpetual cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. The homoerotic element of the movie simmers but never erupts. Unlike Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Dreamers doesn’t make a homosexual attraction explicit, but the implication crackles in every scene between Garrell and Pitt.

The Dreamers takes place almost completely within the rooms of Theo and Isabelle’s apartment, which are casually messy and very European, filled with hardback books and antique plumbling and appliances. Despite the claustrophic setting, Bertollucci’s use of color and composition throughout the movie is amazing. The movie is simply beautiful to look at. If it wasn’t for the element of erotic humiliation that runs throughout, The Dreamers would be a Stealing Beauty 2: a movie about sexual awakening and aesthetic pleasure. Instead, Bertolucci makes the viewer squirm—its dreamy sexuality is given a harder edge by the erotic draw of humiliation, domination, and the taboo of incest.

The Dreamers was given an NC-17 rating when it came out, which limited its viewing audience. In many reviews from the time, it was labeled soft-core porn and Bertolluci was called a pervert for filling the movie with voyeuristic shots of naked actors barely out of their teens. It must be said that The Dreamers is more graphic than most American movies. The interesting thing about the nudity, though, is how equal opportunity it is - Michael Pitt and Louis Garrell spend almost as much time naked as Eva Green does, and the camera spends more time on Pitt’s lips than it does anywhere else. The voyeurism here seems to be directed more at the youth and beauty of the character’s bodies than any particular sexual object.

At the end of the movie, when the real world interrupts the sleep of Theo, Isabelle, and Matthew, it’s no suprise that Matthew, our innocent American, is left watching Theo and Isabelle run off together into a confusion of gunfire and Molotav cocktails. Like the viewer, Matthew wasn’t meant to remain in the dream with Isabelle and Theo. It was never his world anyway.

Letitia Trent is a writer, poet, and teacher living in Vermont. Her chapbook, The Medical Diaries, was recently published by Scantily Clad Press. She keeps a baking blog here.