The Dreamers

[cron]

Stealing beauty

Bernardo Bertolucci's film-making hallmarks are politics and sex. But mostly sex. His latest, The Dreamers, is no exception. He talks to Xan Brooks about 1968 and all that

Thursday February 5, 2004


Bernardo Bertolucci:The Dreamers, he says, is 'a message of hope to the youth of today.'
 
Physically, Bernardo Bertolucci keeps a house in Rome and another in London. But his heart, one suspects, has always lived in Paris. This is the city he first ran to as a teenager, lured by the films of the nouvelle vague, and the one he installed as the backdrop for Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider's infamous last tango back in 1972. With his latest picture he's back there again. Played out against the student uprisings of 1968, The Dreamers is a hothouse valentine to sex and politics and cinema ... but especially sex. Inevitably, wags have been dubbing it his First Tango in Paris.

The Dreamers tells the tale of an American student (Michael Pitt) who gets seduced by a pair of enigmatic siblings (Eva Green, Louis Garrell) and moves into their sprawling Left Bank apartment. Outside it's the Age of Aquarius and the cinemas are screening Godard, Bresson, and the Hollywood classics. Inside there's heated arguments about life and art and stuff, and a tangle of naked limbs in the bathtub. Small wonder the  
viewer gets swept up in the drunken, lusty abandon of it all. According to The New Yorker, The Dreamers "is intense and languid, gritty and dreamy, sexy and silly, sentimental and profound, didactic and inconclusive - that is, pure Bertolucci." It also happens to be the best film he's made in decades.

So Bertolucci takes a seat - specs dangling about his neck, a bottle of champagne at his elbow - and explains that he wasn't actually in Paris at the time of the '68 uprisings but that friends kept him updated on each new development, "each fresh painted slogan on the walls". And while the finished product may be "pure Bertolucci", it didn't start out that way. The Dreamers began life as a novel (The Holy Innocents) by Gilbert Adair, who also wrote the screenplay. But the director retooled it in his own image. He peppered the narrative with clips from the films he loves. He cut out the gay sex and emphasised the straight. So instead of a menage-a-trois drama that tips towards homosexuality, we're left with the tale of a callow Yank who has sex with a foxy French girl while her possessive brother broods on the sidelines.

Bertolucci gives a very Latin shrug. "The gay sex was in the first script, but I had a feeling that it was just too much stuff. It became redundant. I told Gilbert: 'Please don't feel betrayed, but when a book becomes a movie it becomes a whole new conception.' And he told me: 'Be totally unfaithful'. So I think that I've been faithful to the spirit of the book but not the letter. I had to make it mine."

Certainly Bertolucci had been planning a film about the 1968 uprisings for years before The Dreamers came along. He insists, though, that this is no nostalgia trip, an old man's retreat to his bygone youth; claiming that the film has a crucial resonance today. On the one hand he points out that the last scene refers, very deliberately, to recent protests in Genoa and Seattle. On the other, he says that he sees the film as offering "a message of hope to the youth of today. There's a big difference between then and now. In 1968 there was a perception of the future, an assumption that the world could get better and that you'd be a part of that. Today that's not the case. So I wanted to talk about that feeling."

Even so, the director has arrived at a point where there is more road behind him than ahead. Born in Parma, he was a published poet by the time he turned 20, a film-maker at 22. International fame arrived with The Conformist in 1970, while his 1987 epic The Last Emperor won him an Oscar for best director. But today he is very much the elder statesman of world cinema, a balding, bull-like man of 63, who limps a little when he gets up to have his photo taken. "You look at me and you see a very old man, don't you?" he laughs.

For the past 25 years Bertolucci has been married to the British film-maker Clare Peploe. But he has never had any children. He once claimed that he was always too busy being a son to have any of his own; too conditioned by his relationship with his beloved father, Atilio, an Italian poet and critic. "My father died three years ago," he explains. "And having a father who is 90 means that you are still in the position of being the son. Then he dies and you grow up, and already you are an old man. So I feel as though I have gone straight from adolescence to old age without ever being an adult." He confesses though that he felt very paternal towards the young cast of The Dreamers. "For the first time in my life. Ever."

Was his father a mentor to him? "You could say that. Everything I learned, I learned from him, although he would never have referred to himself as something as pompous as a mentor. But he was very supportive of me. He was in love with all my films - except once, when he saw Last Tango in Paris. He came up to me afterwards and was very pale and had a panic attack. He said: 'Have you gone mad? What have you done?' He thought the whole family would be put in jail because of me."

In fact, his father wasn't far off the mark. Packed to the rafters with explicit, de-glamourised sex scenes, Last Tango provoked a major storm in Italy. The film was banned, and Bertolucci received a four-month suspended sentence, and had his civil rights revoked for five years, leaving him unable to vote. Even today the movie continues to cast a shadow. After the film's release, its stars took their director to task over his supposed exploitative tactics. Marlon Brando said he felt "raped" by the film, while co-star Maria Schneider - 19 at the time of filming - has claimed that the movie ruined her life. For her Bertolucci is "a gangster and a pimp" who taught her a harsh lesson: "Never take your clothes off for a middle-aged man who claims that it's art."

These days the director has grown used to shrugging off these charges. "Both of them were more than 21," he says, and then corrects himself: "Or more than 18 anyway. With Brando, we are now very close. But it is true that Maria was very young when we shot the film and maybe she couldn't articulate what happened, so what remains is a confused moment where I am the killer or the bad guy."

Does he feel any sense of responsibility for his actors? "Yes. During the shoot, but not afterwards. Otherwise I would [be left with] a family of dozens of actors. My responsibility is to give them an adventurous or exciting time while we are filming, and then that's it."

That said, Last Tango gave Bertolucci a reputation that continues to dog him. It accounts for his image as an unreconstructed Latin cavalier, flagrant in his treatment of nubile young actors (be it Schneider or Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty); always political but never politically correct. And truth be told, Bertolucci hasn't gone out of his way to shoot down this perception. Collecting his award at the 1987 Oscars, he provoked an ecstasy of embarrassment when he quipped that: "If New York is the Big Apple, then LA for tonight is the Big Nipple." You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

Weighed against all this, of course, is his renown as one of cinema's most acclaimed and distinctive film-makers. On balance, it seems, there is no shortage of female actors eager to work with him. When I wonder if performers such as The Dreamers' Eva Green approach him with some trepidation, he snorts and shrugs and claims that it is all water under the bridge. "I don't think Eva Green even knows who Maria Schneider is," he says.

Actually, this isn't quite true. After our interview I ring the actress at her home in Paris (naturally). Twenty-three last birthday, Eva Green makes a vibrant acting debut on The Dreamers, starring as the sophisticated but virginal cineaste who gets deflowered on the kitchen floor. She tells me that she first watched Last Tango in Paris at the age of 12 and was fully aware of Schneider's gripe with its director. She admits that her mother, her father and her agent all begged her not to star in The Dreamers because "they were scared that I would have the same destiny as Maria Schneider". For good measure, she adds that her parents still object to the film. "My mother really hated it. She didn't sleep afterwards. She is scared that I'll be typecast as some sexual icon."

What was Green's own response? "I saw the film in rough cut, and I was quite shocked," she says. "I looked down when I saw my body and saw the sex scenes. For me it was as though I was wearing a costume while we were making the film. It was as if I had another story in my mind. So I was left speechless."

Green is at pains, though, to defend the director against his accusers. "Bernardo can be manipulative, but at the same time he makes you feel very free. It was a real exchange of ideas. And maybe he is different from how he was in the past. He is sixtysomething, not thirtysomething. Perhaps he is wiser and kinder now." She pauses to consider this. "It's not like he's a pervert," she says. "He is like my dad."

[SoNowThen]

Maria Schneider - 19 at the time of filming - has claimed that the movie ruined her life. For her Bertolucci is "a gangster and a pimp" who taught her a harsh lesson: "Never take your clothes off for a middle-aged man who claims that it's art."

*Nelson voice* Hahaha!


Maria should chill out and realize that: A. if you read the script and it's full of sex, and on set, you're constantly doing sex scenes, chances are the final product is gonna have a lot of sex in it..., and B. she got to be in one of the greatest films of all time, most actresses will never come close to that, so be thankful.

[cron]

i have to see this movie.

[Pwaybloe]

Maria should chill out and realize that: A. if you read the script and it's full of sex, and on set, you're constantly doing sex scenes, chances are the final product is gonna have a lot of sex in it..., and B. she got to be in one of the greatest films of all time, most actresses will never come close to that, so be thankful.

I think she was just mad that they used butter instead of margarine.  Butter is so fattening.

[SoNowThen]

^  by far the best post of the week!!!!!

[godardian]

David Denby's extensive (and lukewarm) review on page 74 of the Feb. 9 New Yorker, along with a full-page B&W Richard Avedon of strangely beautiful star Michael Pitt (who plays "Matthew, a young American movie buff who goes to Paris in 1968"- could that sound any more intriguing?).

[godardian]

Charles Taylor's Salon review

[cron]

such a fantastic poster.... the UK version is also sweet.   again, i have to see this movie.

[Slick Shoes]

Lookin' forward to seeing this film this weekend. I recently stumbled across a picture of Eva Green in this month's edition of British Esquire in which she looks impossibly attractive.

[RegularKarate]

Have heard nothing but shit about this movie.  

and that little Mini-Leo kid makes me want to strangle somebody (namely him)

[ono]

Have heard nothing but shit about this movie.

Specifically?

[Pubrick]

fuck i hate when ebert gives away the ending in his reviews.

[SoNowThen]

'tis why I only read paragraph 1, 2, and the last one, in his reviews... until I've seen the movie.

[Pubrick]

'tis why I only read paragraph 1, 2, and the last one, in his reviews... until I've seen the movie.

me too. it was in the last one that he said sumthing about the final actions of a character. he usually never does that, but he spent most of the review talking about his own experiences in the late 60s.

[SoNowThen]

Hmm... he violated his own internal structure. That's no good...

Well, thanks for telling us anyway, I'll be sure to skip that one until (if ever) Dreamers comes to town.