The Dreamers

(2003, Dir.: Bernardo Bertolucci)

Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, The Dreamers, will likely be a disappointment to all but the keenest fans of titillation. Here’s what you will see: breasts, penises, a vagina. What you won’t see is a coherent idea.

In 1968, American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) has come to Paris to study, and spends his days at the Paris Cinémathèque watching films. When the director of the Cinémathèque is fired, students rally to protest, and it is here that Matthew meets deux et trois of his ménage, Isabelle (Eva Green) and Théo (Louis Garrel). These two, who claim to be twins, drag the ingenuous Matthew back to their home, where he meets their coolly practical mother and their distant, thoughtful father. When the parents leave on vacation, the three are left to their own devices.

This is where the film runs into trouble, because after this, nothing really happens. Matthew is mildly shocked by the siblings’ relationship and behavior toward each other, but the three share a love of film and bland, half-formed philosophical notions, and he is easily inoculated by their odd sexual gamesmanship. Bertolucci is a director trapped in the past: returning to the stew of cultural, sexual and political movements that simmered, then boiled, in the late 1960s. But the intensity of the time is lost, filtered out over the years. Moments that should be crucibles of emotion and conflict instead come across as pale and unaffecting. Bertolucci’s reliance on obvious and well-worn devices, as in a scene where the trio bathe before a triptych of mirrors that reverses Théo and Matthew (ooh, I get it!) is reflective (heh) of a film in which the ideas are worn and the characters thin. All that’s left, really, is the sex.

The characters’ isolation from others—parents, friends, the outside world altogether—is presumably a metaphor for the inner life, a secure locus for the formation of dreams, fantasies, and thoughts, only tenuously tethered to reality. Only this inner life is, in spite of its flamboyant sexuality, curiously static. Once it’s over, it’s hard to see why anyone bothered at all.