Initials B.B.
The Dreamers' May daze: a movie or a measure?

By Johnny Ray Huston

ROMANTIC, ATMOSPHERIC , nostalgic, offhandedly stunning, and extremely silly, the first minutes of The Dreamers are a not-quite-straight dose of Bernardo Bertolucci. His unmatched directorial flair for shadows that dart from the corner of the screen functions as a flirty counterpoint to the severe blocks of black in Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, watched by a rapt crowd at Henri Langlois's famed Cinémathèque Française.

The audience includes American in Paris Matthew (Michael Pitt), who is about to meet cute, protest-style, with Radley Metzger-monikered Siamese twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). Big Brother and the Holding Company surges from the soundtrack, and French new-wave teen icon Jean-Pierre Léaud – giving Udo Kier a run for his money as chief movieland cameo totem – returns to May of 1968 as an old man. But the period detail that sticks is Matthew's Cali-callow voice-over remembrance of things past. Judging from Pitt's tone and phrasing, the specific events his character is preparing to swan-dive back into might have concluded the night before, not decades ago. This Yankee sounds none the wiser. Does his naïveté mirror Bertolucci's?

It's extraordinary that Bertolucci – the masterful stylist whose filmic flesh caresses famously sent Pauline Kael reeling – hasn't indulged a movie-length ménage à trois so thoroughly before but unsurprising that his pleasure principle has found a fresh Pitt to explore. Soon to embody his bowl-cut death-row lookalike, Damien Echols, in a dramatized version of the much documented West Memphis Three case, The Dreamers' lead has clowned, pouted, and thoroughly worked it through a trail of lost paradises lorded over by cinematic fathers who love stealing glances at male beauty; from Larry Clark to Barbet Schroeder (the underrated Sandra Bullock vehicle Murder by Numbers) to Bertolucci, his alt-DiCaprio slackness has been a ready and willing subject of art appreciation.

Skin is the screen for Bertolucci's dreaming, so while Pitt may be the most faux-naive subject on display, he isn't the only one. The Byronic and black-haired Garrel sulks from perspectives that sometimes rival Bertolucci's voyeuristic claiming of space; that is, when his alabaster backside isn't playing peekaboo with the director's camera. Green's facial features bear more than a passing resemblance to Jeanne Moreau's youthful (was she ever, though?), rough elegance, a likeness that magnifies The Dreamers' triple-banana-split revision of Godard's Band of Outsiders and A Woman Is a Woman as well as the Truffaut-Moreau dance Jules and Jim.

Such references are unavoidable: the rules of the games Theo and Isabelle play with Matthew are dictated by movie love – they initiate him through cinematic charades that end in sexual punishment and reward. As the threesome cite to excite, their Louvre-racing exhilaration is met and matched by Bertolucci's affection for the films – The Blue Angel, Freaks, Scarface – that dictate their role-playing. But the director's project is different from that of his erotic-exchange students. Opting for a fictive love letter to the medium rather than the comprehensively critical "I am cinema" surveys recently put forth by Godard and Scorsese, Bertolucci indulges himself and then fleetingly questions that impulse.

The Dreamers is an adaptation of Gilbert Adair's novel The Holy Innocents, but only a few reviewers (Ginette Vincendeau and Armond White most perceptively) have identified its deepest source materials: Jean Cocteau's novel Les enfants terribles and the subsequent film version by Jean-Pierre Melville. As a straightforward variation of those works – which it isn't, exactly – Bertolucci's movie would register as a failure. His trio lack the nuanced dispositions of Cocteau's characters, instead adhering to clichés of mercurial temperament. Elisabeth, the "night-spinning spider" of Cocteau's novel, becomes whorish virgin Isabelle, whose bleeding hymen is no obstacle to her first orgasm. (How Italian.) She understandably leaves the fumble-strewn political and artistic pronouncements to the boys, but her psychology and sexuality are disappointingly interchangeable.

Though Bertolucci fixes a bi eye on the oft-unclad characters, they stop short of acting on both taboos (incest and homosexuality) suggested by their configuration. This dynamic is recurrent in the director's work – did his tutelage under Pier Paolo Pasolini scare him into conformist repression, or does he simply consider a literal depiction too obvious? Either way, his Pasolini past makes his urge to repicture a Cocteau scenario – bringing it into modernity but favoring heterocentric modesty – extra rich.

The Dreamers' turning point – from the teasing reverie that is Bertolucci's unique specialty into the tiresome doldrums that can be his pitfall – occurs when conservative Matthew faints after a shake-it-like-a-Polaroid-picture moment of exposure. Reawakened, he finally enters the twins' childish playland only to discover a sheltered, decaying realm he only half comprehends. The resulting psychological and political insights verge on trite. While Bertolucci aims to highlight the cloistered trio's weaknesses, his (and cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti's) guileful use of mirror reflections only adds dimension to surfaces. One challenge of looking back is to recognize complexities in an earlier self that appeared simpler at the time. In this regard The Dreamers – however beautiful and lively – doesn't seem like the work of a 63-year-old man.

Bertolucci's blinkered yet seductive vision of 1968 arrives on-screen during war-torn 2004. His melancholic sensuality – already punished by the Motion Picture Association of America – is a tonic for a dominating culture so blind to and delusional about its own pornographic agendas that it thinks the Super Bowl is a sacred space. But his treatment of San Diego native Matthew seems placatingly tame in comparison to Bruno Dumont's upcoming, thus far perfectly despised Twentynine Palms – a Molotov cocktail (or at least art-house stink bomb) aimed directly at a military town in the American desert, and more specifically, at the Hummer that is the favorite vehicle of California's film star turned governor.

This complaint may be beside the point. Theo and Isabelle are Cocteau-like children of privilege, and Adair's screenplay has dropped them smack-dab in the era after Cocteau. It takes a brick through a window to rudely remind them that they aren't immortal creatures of myth, but people out of time. Their response seems more pathological than political in terms of motivation – though not in terms of results. Bertolucci, ever benevolent, couples it with a puff of Piaf that signifies no regrets.

'The Dreamers' opens Fri/13 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.