The Dreamers 
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Starring: Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green, Robin Renucci, Anna Chancellor, Florian Cadiou
.
Production: Jeremy Thomas.
Distribution: Medusa.
Year: 2003.
Length: 130 '.
Thirty years after "Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci returns to
close with the camera in an apartment in the French capital. Inside
this time does not take a couple but a trio, united by love of the cinema
and the pursuit of sexual freedom. Outside the shelter instead rages
sessantottino challenge: first staring at the gates of the Cinematheque Francaise
and then, more and more ubiquitous and pervasive, along the boulevard
where students and workers face the blows of police slogan
bottles and Molotov cocktails. Will own the unrest of those days finally, with a stone that is
very providentially against their will break the window to free the trio
derives from a private, exclusive and absorbed as a dream come
obsession.
Before any specific let us consider a general premise. The Dreamers
seems irrefutable proof of the continuing relevance of
theories about "art films" made in the days of the Nouvelle Vague:
regardless of subject matter, they argued Truffaut and his companions, a
film is always the son of a one father, the director, through the staging
transmit their genetic work. The speech
obviously applies only to the great directors and it the microscope of criticism
then identify the chromosomes from which they develop their work. Bertolucci
recognized elite status as an author and accepting the risk of sounding like the voice
tune out from the pack, we try to explain our thinking. In spite of the conditions
The Dreamers is a film narrative and icy
extreme. Sometimes ostentatiously extreme. The look of the cerebral director manages
it to cool an area in which magma youth, love, passion
erotic, political film buff and crystallize into a statue certainly
sinuous and elegant, but carved in ice. Quote for vocation and often for
show, Bertolucci grants any license. Saturates the film music and film references
"high" and to do more mundane uses all'escamotage
mounted in parallel to the original sequences to those re-applying, and saccenza
very little imagination, his pale dreamers. The result is a baroque fresco
impressive as a model
too sure of his charm is alluring offers the photographer's shots, but the viewer does not know how
in that perspective look. The real shortcoming of The Dreamers
in our view, however, is low in emotional temperature of the story
film that freezes the communicative human character and stylistic
however, is chief of the poetic the director. An example: when Bertolucci
Chaplin steals frames, the viewer ends up feeling like a schoolboy
in front of a documentary. If, however, to make such an operation is
Tornatore's Nuovo Cinema Paradiso the viewer is crossed by a
thrill. This is because the first mention scholarship tends to didacticism;
the second emotion.
As to the general sense of the film, the impression (to some extent confirmed by the handful
also a bit 'pathetically raised for the benefit of photographers
Venetian) is that Bertolucci wished to operate a narrative gap between background and foreground
, favoring the political issue to the sentimental
or film. The love triangle, it is true, is the core of the film but
bonds with Isabelle, Theo and Matthew seem at times so
and artifacts devoted to the lyricism of the dialogue or situations from
remain halfway between the power of life lived Dreamlife of enchantment.
not negligible then the hypocrisy with which the director quashed
homosexual attraction that apparently binds to Theo Matthew:
good to keep the American public with the short-man-fist-raised, well let
shred to censor the sex scenes, has also made another small but significant
reverse.
The passionate moviegoer reduced to a quiz concepts and the passion of love in a flat geometric figure
, Bertolucci finally remains on the surface even
political discourse. Stalin, Mao and Godard as icons benevolent and illuminating
fathers and mothers as custodians of the stolid middle class, as cops guard dogs,
featherless young students as infallible bearers of beauty and truth. ... But they were all so dull and snooty
young people then? And freedom, freedom
individual, the freedom to expose the crimes and wrongs of
dictatorship of the proletariat, the freedom not to idolize Godard, freedom of the free short
really nobody cares?
If this is the sublime object of his longings, dear Master, then you
heartened that the dreamers of that kind, unfortunately, the world is still full.
Review by Alessandro Montanari
