February 19-25, 2004

movies

The Revolution: Take One

Keeping a secret: Isabelle (Eva Green, right) shares with Matthew (Michael Pitt).

Cinephilia in love and war.

by Sam Adams

As the camera descends on Matthew (Michael Pitt) in the opening shot of The Dreamers, his wide, soft face seems open to possibility. As Pitt was the clay on Hedwig’s wheel, so Matthew is a blank screen on which any of a thousand films might be projected. With his heavy-lidded eyes and cherubic countenance, he looks indeed as if he is walking through a dream. Even in the spring of 1968, the real world offers little to tempt him from his slumber.

Part of the "freemasonry of cinephiles," Matthew has come to Paris for one reason: to watch movies. "The insatiables," as he dubs them, sit in the front rows, hoping "to receive the images while they were still new, still fresh." Where those images go, what happens to them after they evaporate, is not his concern. He lives in the eternal now of the flickering projector bulb, shielded by the dark from all but the instant on the screen.

Where the protagonists of Bernardo Bertolucci's early films -- Before the Revolution (1964), Partner. (1968), The Spider's Stratagem (1970) -- were would-be revolutionaries whose false consciousness undermined their desire to take action, Matthew's retreat into the ciné-womb is deliberate. It isn't until the tensions outside disrupt his moviegoing that Matthew seems to take notice (although as an American of draftable age sitting out the war on a student deferment, he's surely aware of the precarious state of the world). As the ouster of Henri Langlois, the beloved head of the Cinémathéque Française, touched off a wave of protests that grew into a nationwide general strike, so it opens Matthew's eyes to a world outside the cinema -- or, more importantly, to the relationship between the cinema and the world, a relationship that The Dreamers doesn't attempt to revive so much as reforge.

Outside the Cinémathéque, Matthew meets fellow insatiables Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), the children of a famous poet (Robin Renucci). Isabelle appears to have chained herself to the gates of the Cinémathéque in protest, but her self-imposed imprisonment (and, by extension, her devotion to the cause) turn out to be illusory: a serpentine twist of the arms, and the chain falls away. Like so many actresses of the time, and so few since, Green seems not to enact freedom so much as embody it, a freedom so total it is at once intoxicating and terrifying. (Think Julie Christie in Billy Liar, or Anna Karina in just about anything.) Green doesn't have those actresses' eccentric beauty -- with her flowing hair and filmy wardrobe, she's pure pinup fantasy -- but she's not as inert as Liv Tyler was in Stealing Beauty. While the boys debate Chaplin vs. Keaton (and Clapton vs. Hendrix), she's acting out Garbo in Queen Christina, or Karina in Band of Outsiders, configuring a new mode of existence, using the cinema as her building blocks.

Isabelle tells Matthew she was born in 1959, "on the pavement of the Champs-Elysées," as the appropriate home movie flashes before our eyes: Jean Seberg hawking newspapers in Breathless. Isabelle's equation of her "birth" with the beginning of the New Wave is typical film-buff hyperbole, but it also indicates that she grasps something the boys don't: The images on the screen aren't just to be emulated or desired, but interacted with. When, at Isabelle's urging, the three re-enact Band of Outsiders' mad dash through the Louvre, they're aping Godard's characters' disregard for the treasures of the Old World, but they're forging their own identities in the process. The image flips back and forth between original and re-creation, as if they threaten to merge, but Bertolucci's trio makes it through faster than Godard's. They've outrun history.

Their bid for escape proves dangerously successful. Matthew moves in with Isabelle and Theo, and their parents leave the three alone in the apartment, at which point The Dreamers becomes a gloss on Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles (an explicit inspiration for Gilbert Adair's source novel, The Holy Innocents). In the hothouse environment, movie love becomes movie lust, and Isabelle and Theo's private game of acting out favorite scenes for each other takes on erotic overtones. When Theo fails to recognize Isabelle's re-enactment of Blonde Venus (starring that icon of erotic liberation Marlene Dietrich), he must "pay the forfeit" by masturbating to a picture of Dietrich in The Blue Angel, in full view of his sister and their new houseguest. It's only the most literally masturbatory manifestation of Theo's cinephilia, which -- in keeping with Bertolucci's desire not to make a "historical movie" -- has more to do with Kill Bill than Cahiers du Cinéma. Theo may be a self-proclaimed Maoist (via Godard, as testified to by the La Chinoise poster that hangs over his bed), but as Matthew points out, "I think you prefer it when "together' means just two or three."

Like a film loop cycling endlessly in a porno booth, the three feed on each other, insatiable indeed. Though Adair's novel has been scrubbed of all but the suggestion of an attraction between Theo and Matthew (and what remains is emphatically one-sided), Isabelle is frequently positioned between the two, the medium through which they all connect. When Daddy's money runs out and there's no food in the house, Matthew takes a banana, sticks his finger in the top and rotates it slowly: It blossoms like a flower, split into perfect thirds.

Bertolucci lards on the Gauloise Gothic touches to let you know their hermetic idyll can't last; with its matching teddy bears, Isabelle's bedroom looks like the set for a B-movie production of The Fall of the House of Usher. When Isabelle can't identify Theo's re-enactment of the death scene from Scarface (memo: The End is Nigh), he orders her and Matthew to deflower each other, then cooks dinner while they go at it on the kitchen floor. The Dreamers expresses submerged longings far more eloquently than emerged passions; for all Matthew and Isabelle's cheerful humping, there's nothing so erotic as the moment when she leans in to kiss him for the first time, and a candle briefly sets her hair alight.

By The Dreamers' last scene, that flame has become Molotov cocktails exploding on the streets of St. Germain. But the paving stone that flies through the window, shattering the trio's reverie, shatters the movie, too, triggering a coda that is somehow both moralistic and ambivalent. "If you want to change the world, you must realize that you yourself are a part of it," advises Theo and Isabelle's father, before exiting stage left. "You can't stand outside." (The actor who plays him physically resembles Bertolucci, and like the director, is married to an Englishwoman.) But standing outside is what Bertolucci's characters do best; consummation, sexual or political, has never been his forte. "This is only the beginning," the students shout as they march through the streets, but as far as the film's concerned, it's almost the end. Their chant -- which appears as a promise in Partner. and a warning in The Spider's Stratagem -- is a signpost to the places the movie can't go. "For people like me, it's always before the revolution," lamented the bourgeois hero of Before the Revolution; 42 years later, Bertolucci is still poised in mid-step. The story may go on, but Bertolucci will never be the one to tell it.

The Dreamers

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci A Fox Searchlight release Now playing at Ritz Five

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