The Dreamers

Started by MacGuffin, December 19, 2003, 09:28:32 PM

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NEON MERCURY

#45
February 15, 2004, 08:12:12 PM
Quote from: RegularKarate

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

hahahaha...it does look like him......

Henry Hill

#46
February 16, 2004, 11:53:31 AM
You mean...that's not Leo?  :?  In all seriousness the only thing I know from Bertolucci is his involvement with Once Upon a Time in the West. I saw Ebert's review on his show and it looks like a really neat film. I'll see it.

Slick Shoes

#47
February 17, 2004, 12:06:57 PM
It was funnier than I thought it would be.

Gold Trumpet

#48
February 20, 2004, 02:44:47 PM
Here's in an interesting review (from Stanley Kauffmann):

The news of a new Bernardo Bertolucci film gave me a double pang. The first was nostalgia for the high postwar days of Italian film. Bertolucci is much younger than the vanguard of that postwar group--he was born in 1940, Antonioni in 1912; but he was so active in the later days of the period, and his first notable film, Before the Revolution (1964), was so patently influenced by Antonioni that he almost seems the group's protégé. The second pang was fear--about the subject. For a long time Bertolucci seems to have been ravenous for subjects, sometimes grabbing at matters quite far from his temperament (The Last Emperor, Little Buddha), sometimes wallowing in poor material because it was close to his temperament (La Luna, Besieged, Stealing Beauty). Well, at least The Dreamers is in the latter group, close to what we might think of as Bertolucci's realm, but it is fraught with new poignancies.  

The screenplay is by the English film critic Gilbert Adair, who adapted it from one of his novels. Its title is too oblique: it might better have been called The Fantasists. The place is Paris in 1968. A twenty-year-old American named Matthew is there, supposedly studying French. We learn from his voice-over comments (bits of letters to his mother) that he has started going to the Cinémathèque and has become intoxicated with film, especially the American films that are often shown there. It is the year when Henri Langlois, the co-founder of the Cinémathèque and now its head, is slated for discharge by the government, which subsidizes the place. This act provokes fierce student riots that persist until Langlois is reinstated. During the riots Matthew meets two French students, Théo and Isabelle, twins of about his own age who speak English. They take him home to meet their English mother and their poet father. (Incidentally, Bertolucci's father was a poet.) Papa is mild about Matthew until the youth absentmindedly works out a sort of Paul Auster pattern on the tablecloth with a cigarette lighter. Papa is now impressed with the youth. As the parents are off to the country, Papa suggests that Matthew be invited to stay with Isabelle and Théo in this palatial Art Nouveau apartment.

Thus these three young people are ensconced in luxury, well equipped with food and wine and gonads. Outside the apartment the student riots are still boiling. Inside, the three go through various stages of friendship, intimacy, disputation, reconciliation, conveyed in gnomic dialogue. The three are linked by, among other things, their passion for film. They quarrel about Chaplin and Keaton, they imitate a death in Scarface, they mimic Garbo in Queen Christina, and much more, abetted by appropriate film clips that Bertolucci slips in. (The one grating insert in this movie-buff mélange is the death of Mouchette in Bresson's crystalline film.) All through the long stay in the apartment the relatively innocent Matthew is fascinated with this plunge into, as he thinks, continental depths, and the twins tease him, step by step, with their sexual freedom.

The twins are quasi-incestuous; they are often nude together, though apparently they never actually have sex. Matthew, too, is soon nude with them: full frontal nudity is the order of the day--and night. Amidst the numerous incidents, the three of them loll together in a foamy bathtub, which I suppose indicates that at heart they are still children. But they are not often innocent babes. One critic said that he found The Dreamers "disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting." The sweetness and enchantment must then include the scene in which Théo masturbates on a photo of Marlene Dietrich because Isabelle commanded him to do so, while she and Matthew watch. Then she scrapes Théo's semen off the wall and sniffs it. Sweet and enchanting, too, must have been the kitchen scene where Théo is frying eggs while Isabelle and Matthew are screwing on the floor behind him.

What is eventually dispiriting about these scenes, about the whole film, is that it all proceeds to no purpose. Possibly these sex episodes are meant to deride taboos and are performed by people somehow liberated by a passion for film, but, because these scenes are so overweeningly sophisticated, are in a smug way mere showing off, they soon degenerate into the escapades of naughty children who happen to be old enough to screw. These episodes just go on and on until a rioter's stone breaks a window. This presumably reminds them of their cinephile duty: the trio move into the streets and re-join the rioters. Politics and sex have often been conjoined in Bertolucci but never to so little point.  

Two of the young actors are adequate. Louis Garrel as Théo carries on competently in the Jean-Claude Brialy tradition--the young French intellectual who seems to be sitting at a café table even when he is walking around. Eve Green is lovely and generally sincere. But Michael Pitt as Matthew, trying hard, never cracks the cellophane in which he seems to have been shipped to France.

Bertolucci's directing has its usual sweep, its deft and startling use of close-ups, and the editing that, though logical, always seems a bit impatient. (The cinematography by Fabio Cianchetti is suitably lush.) But the overall effect of the film is melancholy: it seems desperate for the past. First, there are the several reminders of Last Tango in Paris. They begin with the glimpses of Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was the young film-maker in the earlier film, and who is involved in the riots here. (He is shot from a distance so that he can look as he looked in 1972.) Second, there is the very setting: once again Bertolucci wanted to stage his sexual circus in Paris. (And in Paris he could also have student riots about film.) Third, there is the use of the apartment as discrete sexual arena. In Last Tango it was an unfurnished place, this one is lavish. It is almost as if Bertolucci had thought, "Let's vary it this time. And, for further variation, this time let's have three people instead of two. And no Brando equivalent. This time everyone is young."

Sadly, this helps to make it an old man's picture. Bertolucci is now only sixty-three, after which age many a director has done good work, but in this film he strives so strenuously for the past that he seems to be facing backward. The very blatancy of the sex, its calculated lazy bravado, make us suspect that Bertolucci dyes his hair and worries about his chin line. In Last Tango the sex was only moderately explicit, but that apartment reeked of erotic musk: in this film the sex is much more explicit, but the effect is much more voyeuristic than engulfing.  

Saddest of all is his ache for 1968, for the cinephilia embedded in it, for the Bertolucci and the world that existed then. He longs for the time when students would riot because the Cinémathèque director-founder was assailed. He longs for the time when young people interwove cinematic passion with almost everything they thought and did--including, he posits somewhat enviously, torrential sex.

In 1966 I published an essay called "The Film Generation," which was about the American counterparts of those French students. Twenty years later I published an essay called "After the Film Generation," an obituary. It wouldn't have done any good to send Bertolucci a copy of the second piece. He knew everything in it and also knew that, when the chance came, he intended to disregard it. He wanted one more tango in Paris.

SoNowThen

#49
February 20, 2004, 02:48:01 PM
SoNowThen gets to see this movie this weekend. All rejoice!!
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

#50
February 20, 2004, 02:57:07 PM
I'm seeing it Sunday.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

SoNowThen

#51
February 22, 2004, 04:13:46 PM
So I saw this on Saturday night. At a nice arthouse theatre with real big red curtains and a balcony. For some reason that always makes the movie experience better.

I was about to write this off halfway through, however. Seemed Bertolucci wasn't coming up with the great shots I expected of him, and just falling into a soft-core turnaround. But... the last 15 minutes or so really brought everything together nicely, and proved that he did have a greater point, after all. And I quite enjoyed the clip of Mouchette, as that is the one Bresson movie I've never really loved, yet the way BB used it in this movie made me wanna see it again.

2 last things:

1. Music, although decent, was too Hendrix/Doors/Joplin heavy. I woulda liked Dylan/Beatles/Stones, but I suppose that would have cost more. Sucks all the same.

2. That french girl (Eva Green), wow, she has a killer body. BOOM :shock:

Flick won't be for everyone though.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

#52
February 22, 2004, 06:54:28 PM
I just got back from this....

What can I say? It made my chest hurt. I was astounded, astonished, exhalted. I flooooooaaated out of the place. It was much, much more in every way than I had hoped for.

A paean to cinema for all the cinephiles... a touching, bittersweet, lovely memento of the passion and freedom and exhilaration of youth... beautiful camerawork and cinematography... quite sophisticatedly polyerotic and accepting of sex and anatomy in the good European way, (happily) to the disappointment of some of my infantile fellow attendees who snickered at every glimpse of nudity like good 'ol sexually retarded Americans... I suppose I agree with SNT about the music on a personal-preference level, but it really seemed to work (so glad I had "Tous le Garcons..." on my headphones- I played it all the way home- and of course the borrowed music from the great films was fantastic)... loved the many little incidental bows to greats of the time like Sontag (Matthew's even reading Death Kit!!), Barthes, Francoise Hardy, Langlois, and of course all the films and filmmakers so lovingly given tribute...

I was overjoyed with it. It's the best Bertolucci I've seen since The Conformist. It's an exemplary work from a filmmaker who hasn't always given us his best... if he was holding out on us only to let us gorge ourselves on this triumph, though, it was well worth it. I can't wait to see it again. And again. And again. And then buy the DVD.

To top it all off, as a complement to the breathtaking Mouchette interpolation in the film, I saw that a revival of Au Hasard Balthazar is coming to the cinema that was playing The Dreamers.

It was just one of those purely happy cinema-days for me... and the sun even showed itself in Seattle today, so no scurrying in the rain.  :)
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

cron

#53
February 25, 2004, 07:17:41 AM
GOD ALMIGHTY LORD THIS IS THE BEST FILM EVER

and yup, i couldn't help thinking that Godardian would love it. Specially because of that Susan Sontag book on the desk.
context, context, context.

Pubrick

#54
February 25, 2004, 07:19:15 AM
i regret not jumping on this bandwagon earlier.
under the paving stones.

cron

#55
February 25, 2004, 07:27:33 AM
what does that mean, P?  explain... you and your bandwagons...  :?
context, context, context.

Pubrick

#56
February 25, 2004, 07:36:44 AM
haha, i mean that i wish i could claim that i knew this movie would be so awesome before anyone could confirm it. i remember seeing it listed on Sundance and i dismissed it cos the title wasn't good enuff. and then the poster was the second sign i ignored..

now i'm just a regular loser who likes sumthing after everyone else  :shock:
under the paving stones.

cron

#57
February 25, 2004, 07:48:57 AM
:D
context, context, context.

Ghostboy

#58
March 06, 2004, 06:40:21 PM
I FINALLY saw this movie this morning, after a series of frustrating delays. I went into the theater charged up and ready to see my love of cinema reflected back at me with the vibrant passion suggested by the reviews of Ebert and various individuals in this thread. I wasn't disappointed (nor did I leave unaroused -- seriously, this movie is vivaciously erotic and not in a teasing sort of way). If the adrenalien rush it provided was hindered in any way, it's because the first forty minutes are so consistently electric that, after the first sex scene, I felt somewhat exhausted. I am now about to delve into some research on the political climate the film takes place in, since I don't know the first thing about it.

Chest Rockwell

#59
March 07, 2004, 06:20:01 AM
I want to see this sooo much. Is there a chance it will ever see a wide release?
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