Le Reve De Paris Romances Paris

Release date: February 13, 2004
Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
Starring: Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green

For all New York's bluster and sparkle, Paris is still the original city of dreams. Mere mention of the French capital conjures images of turtlenecked poets brooding in starlit cafes, dandified flaneurs strolling the narrow boulevards and perfectly glamourous femmes sipping absinthe under gas lanterns. If you can find $900, you can book yourself a flight to Paris any time, but you'll only get the real Paris; the best Paris exists in fantasies of romance and heady European languor.

The Paris of Bertolucci's The Dreamers falls somewhere in between. It's rent by riots and political dissent, but that just serves to make it more sexy. Its youth are in love with socialism and wooed by cinema, and they dabble in naughty sex that skirts the edges of shame and subversion in equal measure. It's a Paris of the '60s — that most tumultuous and sentimentalized of decades — and comes with all the requisite anger, anxiousness and idealism.

Matthew (Micheal Pitt) is an American studying in Paris. He's thrilled by the city, but lonely enough that masturbating over a letter written to his mom seems like a good way to pass the time. That changes when he meets siblings Theo and Isabelle (Louis Garelle and Eva Green) outside the Cinematheque Francaise, right before the outbreak of the May '68 riots that shut down much of the French government.

Drawing on their shared love of cinema and American pop culture, the trio forge a strange friendship, sequestering themselves in an apartment belonging to Theo and Isabelle's parents. Over time, their trivia games lead to sexual exploration and all kinds of would-be kinky relationship layers start to develop and ferment.

I say would-be, because for all the hype surrounding The Dreamers' NC-17 rating in the States (it only gets an R-rating here), the film's dominant tone is one of charming innocence. There's plenty of nudity and frank treatment of things like voyeurism and incest, but none of it is remotely shocking or uncomfortable.

Comparisons to Bertolucci's sultry 1972 classic, Last Tango In Paris, are inevitable, but misplaced; The Dreamers' subject is revolution, but it makes no pretense of starting one. In fact, it can be taken as a nostalgic lament for a time when film and political idealism were inseparable — when a love of cinema was as much a badge as a hobby. It makes sense; brilliant British critic and sometimes cinematic Luddite Gilbert Adair wrote the script and Bertolucci himself has always been infatuated with things passing or already lost (see The Last Emperor or Stealing Beauty).

All this is fine, because while the filmmakers' gushing affection sometimes moons itself into confusion, Bertolucci's visual style ensures that The Dreamers always pleasant to watch. His pictures are (as to be expected) soft, fleshy and oh-so-sensual, even when they're skipping through the heat of a riot. And it works even better than usual this time, because while he's still dealing in the exotic and the alluring, you get the sense this is exoticism that's familiar to Bertolucci — it's his own love of cinema filtered through the eyes of those still freshly awed by its power.

That said, The Dreamers' pleasures stop short of real substance. Pitt, Garelle and Green are good as the innocent cineastes, but Pitt in particular sometimes over-fawns and ends up coming off like a hyper-fey Leonardo DiCaprio. And for all their experiments and explorations, the trio mostly ends up where they started.

In the end, for all the warm fuzz and fervour The Dreamers leaves you with, it also fails to satisfyingly harness its politics, or to find anything definite in its fleshy ponderings — it's all foreplay, no climax. But maybe that's the point; dreams, after all, rarely end conclusively. More often than not, you still remember them with fondness — maybe even a kind of love. Big-mouthed rock stars might tell us to dream until our dreams come true, but what do they know? Maybe dreams are better left as memories.