Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic profession of love for film and Paris of 1968.
In the gray February of 1968, the French Ministry of Culture fires Henri Langlois, the famous founder and director of the Cinémathèque française, inviting a wave of protests that anticipate the general strike of May. American exchange student Matthew (Michael Pitt) meets twins Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) by the closed cinémathèque. They invite him to dinner and invite him stay while their parents are away. The empty rooms of the giant bourgeois flat become a set for the reenactment of the trio’s favorite films. Absorbed in their game, the new friends start acting out each other’s erotic fantasies as punishment for failing to guess a film. The three become inseparable and, locked in their apartment, have no desire to end the game, which is interrupted by a brick that breaks a window, allowing in the screams of the protesters. Matthew, Théo, and Isabelle rush to the streets, where they go their separate ways: Matthew rejects violence and leaves, while the twins stay with a Molotov cocktail in hand.
The Dreamers begins and ends with the events of 1968, a year driven by sex, film, and politics. In the movie these forces pulsate with red: a red beret, a red blouse, red book covers, red film posters, red revolutionary banners, red blood—from the loss of innocence to street violence. But red does not take over the screen and redefine things. The Dreamers is one of Bertolucci’s late works, in which he, as a witness of 1968 and despite his nostalgia for it, speaks mainly of disenchantment. In the closed world of their home, the dreamers see sexual liberation, love of film, and politics as one thing, but they break their ties as soon as they leave the house.
The film will be screened in English and French with Russian subtitles.
The Dreamers
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
UK, France, Italy, USA, 2003. 155 min
18+
