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| Michael Pitt, Eva Green, and Louis Garrel in The Dreamers |
Cast: Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Anna Chancellor, Robin Renucci. Screenplay: Gilbert Adair, based on his novel. Cinematography: Fabio Cianchetti. Production design: Jean Rabasse. Film editing: Jacopo Quadri.
Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American in Paris in 1968, meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother, Théo (Louis Garrel), at the protest over the firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque Française, and is invited home to dinner with them. There he meets their parents, a prominent French poet (Robin Renucci) and his English wife (Anna Chancellor), and is invited to stay over for the night. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he is surprised to see, through a partly opened door, Isabelle and Théo sharing a bed, naked. The next day, the parents depart on a month's vacation, leaving a check for the twins to cover their expenses. Matthew accepts an invitation from them to move into a spare room. And so begins a month in which Matthew's view of life is altered. Matthew, Isabelle, and Théo form a ménage familiar to them from the movies they have watched, like Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964), whose familiar run through the Louvre they re-create. The sex and nudity in The Dreamers earned it an NC-17 rating, but when I learned that in the novel on which the film is based Matthew has sex not only with Isabelle but also with Théo, I wondered if Bertolucci regarded homosexuality as more transgressive than incest. Though The Dreamers intends to shock, it pales in comparison to the work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat. A handsome and well-acted film, it feels inert, and an insertion of a scene from Robert Bresson's unsparing Mouchette (1967) in the film reveals how conventional and glossy it really is.
