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The Dreamers (NC-17 Edition) Customer Reviews (28 - 30 of 78 Reviews)

Biggest waste of time possible
This movie begins with the eerie and masterfully written opening to Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring in the soundtrack ... soon it descends into absolute stupidity and boredom. Aside from the fact that this movie is so universally bad that I am yet to meet anyone that has found it worth watching (these friends are film buffs, as one might say) the movie also represents how pathetic mass-counter culture is. Film has replaced progressive culture in frightening ways and contributed to the atomization of the individual in our society (a la Hegel and Marx). People sit and stare at a screen with little interaction, except to hush someone who makes a comment during a film. Then you see how pathetic these characters are ... they literally live their lives through a consciousness that cannot see hte world except through film scenes. If anyone has read any Adorno, you will know what the dangers of this are ... not to mention how pathetic it is. Yes, let film replace culture, let those who consider themselves progressive or liberal believe that the cure to our society's consumerism is to see their lives in terms of mass produced film scenes and to sit silently before a screen, ignorant to whether the people they are with are still in the room. This is the state of community in our times ... and culture as well. Progressives criticize the turn away from the welfare state in our society, and then, instead of going out into civil society and engaging in politics and going to places where one finds genuine social interaction ... even at a bar with no televisions, instead, they sit home and watch movies with the same three people. Then they pull out some trite postmodern postures, which are philosophically lacking any rigor or sophistication (read any of a variety of books, perhaps the most well-known, but not best, is Against Theory) to justify their inaction and stupidity. Or what is worse, they watch television shows they know to be banal or rent movies of the most extreme stupidity and claim that they are really doing a cultural critique of them. Why not just admit a horrible case of akrasia? At least be honest with yourself? If you or someone you know enjoys this film, know that it cannot be for the rather PG sex scenes, but instead because they are ill in the head. Some Adorno may fix that problem.

The Spirit is Lost
"We're shoting today and we're dreaming of the sixties" - Bertolucci's comment in the documentary TV film "Cinema, Sex, Politics", David Thompson (dir.), BBC, 2003.

Bertolucci is an Italian director filming in Paris in French and English in 2003. Despite this cross proper of European Union times, the movie is clearly American, with an exception . Let me explain myself: the protagonist is a young American boy nineteen years old called Matthew. We discover what is happening from his eyes, as if Matthew was in fact a young Roger Ebert or Jonathan Rosenbaum in the days of May (Rosenbaum in fact reached Paris only in mid-June, but nevertheless became friends with Gilbert Adair, the author of the novel on which the movie is based). Most of the movie is in English, being the French used only as a foreign language in French soil, making the use of subtitles unnecessary. But there is a great deal of sex in the film (is a "Bertolucci" in the end) so it is distributed in the United States under the prohibitive NC-17 rating, reserved ordinarily only for pornography. Under the guise of "art", this film is the closest American audiences can get to sex on the screen without feeling dirty in a wide distributed film. An American director couldn't have pulled this off. Probably the fact that Bertolucci is European allowed him to film the movie knowing that the American market would be open: strangers are allowed sometimes to trespass local red lines in the name of a supposedly exotic "high art".

"Nostalgia is highly selective, abridging the past and adjusting it to fit the terms of the present -- and often becoming an ideological con job in the process. Those who wax nostalgic about the radicalism of their youth usually imply that the values that made it so attractive back then also make it impossible to hold on to today", notes Jonathan Rosenbaum , resuming in four lines the central thing to be said about "The Dreamers". Nostalgia is the mode utilized by Bertolucci when looking at the past, even when is not for him because he was not in Paris at the moment but in Rome filming "Partner".

"Cinema, Sex, Politics" is one of the film's taglines and is the one that defines the importance given to each element, with the first two competing with each other and the third one in a far place showing strongly only in the last minutes.
The May of this film starts in February when famous bunch of filmmakers and a lot of cinéphiles showed up at the Cinématique doors to ask for the restitution of Henri Langlois, the deposed Cinématique director. For the film (and also for Ebert, which should know better), this act of middle-class rebellion against an order from the administration is the origin of all which came later. Class politics doesn't seem to be a part of it but cultural freedom and transgression it is. This last concept is central for this version of history. The young demonstrators in Bertolucci's world are transgressors that needed to cross the line of authority as a development need of their age. The problem between the repressive forces of order and the young students is reduced as a generational gap that naturally occurs. Workers, clearly, are not seen anywhere. Bertolucci's view is close to the one of those "repented" leaders talking after twenty years about their `foolish' behavior on the streets of 1968.

Cinema: "The Dreamers" is full of quotations and homages to all kind of films, but the most impressive is to feature references to four Godard films being the exact political opposite. "a bout de soufflé" is referenced as the birth date of Isabella (the beginning of the nouvelle vague), and a central sequence of "Bande a part" signals the moment when Matthew becomes part of the threesome, which is suggested but not explicitly showed: heterosexual sex is accepted, but the homosexual overtones of the original novel by Adair are censored. Being the tension still present between Matthew and Theo, is understandable why no references to Truffaut's "Jules et Jim" are to be found. "La Chinoise" appears only as a poster in Theo's room, in place with the rest of gauchiste references in the apartment. It seems that political films are not to be included in the film buff games played by the trio, but only romantic scenes and one death (the one in "Scarface"), this being understandable under the trio's desire to escape reality. In this sense the film is being schizophrenic: in one side Matthew warns us at the beginning about the wish of protection from reality that offers the silver screen, but on the other all the political events are explained starting from the resistance to the removal of Mr. Langlois from the Cinemateque and his eventual restitution. Events are compared with film. The central political discussion to happen between Matthew and Theo starts from Theo's metaphor of Maoist "cultural revolution" as a blockbuster production with millions of participants, to what Matthew answers: "yes, but everybody as extras". Matthew's critic to Maoism is not far from the totalitarian truth ("all the millions with only one book in their hands") but his comment reveals a need for individual protagonists in history: the masses cannot in this view be important or desirable.

Sex: "The Dreamers" is overtly conservative in its sex politics. Isabella seems to be sexually active, only to be discovered later that this attitude "was only acting". Isabella is virgin and her first sexual act (with Matthew) is compared with a street manifestation. Is Bertolucci saying that to manifest is the birth of a pleasurable and productive activity that hurts at the beginning? I doubt so. It seems that the painful part of the act is the only element considered for the metaphor. Matthew considers all the sex games in which they indulge to be "children behavior", and later on he will relate this to political activism. It is clear now that for Bertolucci the student's revolt is in fact child's play. After some pseudo-explicit heterosexual sex we find the three characters in a single bath-tube to be scorned tight away by Matthew who enters into a fit of reproach towards Isabella and asks her on an American-like date. The possibility of the non-existence of that kind of relationship between a men and a woman ("dating") is promptly negated by Matthew: "They have dates in France, don't you?", being this phrase an almost culturally imperialistic assumption about custom in France . The nostalgic touch intends to connect May 1968 with a supposed explosion in promiscuity not matched by reality: the movie comes closer to be Bertolucci's version of Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous". At least it doesn't transform the Sorbonne into the orgy Malle suggests, but limits the sexual activity to the apartment and disconnects it from what is happening outside (metaphor apart). Rosenbaum again is helpful suggesting that the highlight in sex has more to do with the differences between American and French attitudes toward pleasure than to the politics of the day. The same could have been filmed had Matthew traveled to Brazil or Thailand at the end of the 20th century (being the difference, and an important one, that Isabelle is white and "European").

Politics: After the demonstration in February at the Cinématique, reality remains outside of the picture until the date scene. Matthew and Isabella observe what is happening through a TV in a store window at night and a voice over (Matthew) informs us in a negative tone: "they're not students anymore", implying that the participants in May "disturbances" are not the genuine forces of youth who started it all in defense of cultural diversity (or more narrowly, the right to see all kind of films in a building in Paris). After this they turn around and observe in awe an enormous pile of uncollected garbage reaching half the length of a post lamp. The garbage represents May exactly in the same way that a pile of shoes represents the Holocaust in Benigni's "Life is Beautiful": is a banal reduction of a complex historical event to a single image devoid of human presence; it is in fact what remains of human activity after all what is important in an historical sense has terminated to happen. The pile of garbage points to the disorderly nature of the events, only noted when thinking the number of options available to Bertolucci when choosing a representation: many other images could have been chosen, between them some more positive.
At the end of the film (the last five minutes) reality intrudes into the fantasy world of our three heroes. The three go out of the apartment and doubling as our point of view the camera enters into the mass of demonstrators. This is the only film of the three were demonstrations are seen on the screen directly, and Bertolucci makes sure none of us stays at the sidewalk. We enter the manifestation and we are lost for a moment. When Matthew sees the two brothers he asks of Isabella to put an end to all of the games, but Theo takes a Molotov cocktail and Isabella decides to join him. Matthew presents a pacifist argument even when before he was defending the (poor) American soldiers in Vietnam . "A Molotov is fascism on a bottle" is the key here. It is that? Theo throws the explosive cocktail, and his act seems on the screen not the result of his ideological convictions finally put into action (debunked before in the conversation about Maoism) but of jealously and immature behavior. The American boy, Bertolucci and us abandon the two brothers at the middle of violence and retreat from history. When the supposed realism of the historical Hollywood film menaces to bring History out of memory the effect of nostalgia finishes and thoughtful remarks about the past can arise. Is precisely in this moment in which Bertolucci decides to end his account. At the beginning of the 21st Century, only nostalgia about the days when they were young is what the "Baby Boomer" generation -on the States and those who act like them- can allow themselves to record.

Times have changed. Today no pavement stones remain on the popular neighborhoods of Paris. To film the final demonstration scene, Bertolucci needed to ask permission to the rich inhabitants of one of the more exclusive arrondissements and wait for them to leave in the heat of August toward the beach. In the international sphere, America has shown to be the government prepared to act violently at every moment, and France the one trying to appease the expansive drive of the empire. On the Third World areas affected by this expansion, a new kind of popular resistance, many times more deadly and many times less ideologically backed is breeding and acting, hurting sometimes those who cannot defend themselves. If Bertolucci asks for those who feel that the world is not right not to resist, why he doesn't do the same with the repressive and expansive activities of power? Is he only interested in involving France and America in metaphoric love-making? If there is such a thing as an esprit du mai, it has here been lost.

Excellent movie with superb actors
Yesterday I saw this film. I hoped it would transmit the feeling of the '68 and the film did. Not only the menage a trois but also the surrounding atmosphere of Paris and the streets have also been really fantastic.

The sex scenes of two of the three main-actors has been really realistic and often quoted as reality and not acting. From my point of view great parts of the film focuses on the relationship between the three characters which has the result that a great part of the "real" history has to be reduced.

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