The Dreamers possesses a familiar and ineluctable gravity, due in great part to its director’s surname. The iconic peal of “Bertolucci” draws viewers towards the cineplex, promising that whatever images are moving onscreen will, at the very least, be worth watching. I’ve yet to sort out the implications of that feeble conjecture. As a cinephile, there is an ingrained loyalty to those filmmakers with glorious pasts; we often flock to our seats merely as homage to greatness that once was, as that indelible inner voice reminds us that this could be the one, the return to form. It’s important to remain hopeful.

Hope sinks. The Dreamers, as many predicted, as preliminary coverage suggested, as its telling candy-colored-and-yet-so-bland advertisements inadvertently capture, is another letdown. Granted, that means it’s no Before the Revolution, The Conformist or Last Tango in Paris, (this list is certainly not exhaustive.) Yet because of its cinephilic subject matter and beguiling aestheticism (newcomer Eva Green included), it’s a film destined to be 2004’s “guilty pleasure” for film lovers worldwide. Sadly, because this is our beloved Bertolucci, that title is perhaps far more consequential than it first sounds.

Who can help but embrace the vagrant naïf Matthew (Michael Pitt) drifting into the cinematic Eden that is Paris 1968? Admittedly, I’ve a particular affinity for the name, but Pitt plays out a fantasy all cinephiles have conjured at least once in a daydream: he gets to be there, to hear “Nicholas Ray is cinema” from the mouth of a young man still enamored of the statement because the divine phrase-coining Cahier critic is still in the process of reconsidering the way we watch movies. (This Matthew was ready with a retort—Godard’s Bitter Victory-inspired quote was “…the cinema is Nicholas Ray.” This is a deviously enticing film.)

“Only the French would house a cinema inside a Palace,” Matthew muses, drawn to Henri Langlois’s Cinematheque Française where he finds Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor among other now-terminally-shelved cinematic wonders to distract him from university French lessons. He becomes a regular among the “freemasonry of cinephiles,” inveterate filmgoers who live for the big-screen; in boyish voiceover he comments on the passionate “insatiables,” his crew that sit in the front rows so they’ll “receive the images first…While they’re still new, still fresh.” When Chez Langlois is closed down by the police, not-so-social Matthew encounters to-die-for Isabelle (the aforementioned Green), a fellow cineaste chained (falsely) to the palace gates in protest. The daughter of a famous French poet and British mother, Isabelle’s sound English skills put Matthew at ease for the few moments before her equally ravishing brother Theo (Louis Garrell) arrives. Before night falls the beautiful twins have taken to beautiful Matthew, and the next morning he receives an invitation to dine with the family at their beautiful home.

Following the meal, Matthew’s sophomoric ruminations on the relationship between a cigarette lighter, the tablecloth, Isabelle’s fingers, (the universe!), find him in favor with Father. The poet likes this odd American and so does his daughter; Matthew spends the night in the guest room. On an early morning trip to the bathroom, he’s disturbed to learn that the inseparable brother-sister pair sleep in Theo’s bed, nude. Still, this peculiarity isn’t enough to deter him from an enticing invitation; with the parents conveniently off on a holiday and the burgeoning student revolt brewing on the streets outside, Matthew moves in. An impressively solipsistic cocktail of sex, cinema, and rock ‘n’ roll ensues.

Isabelle perpetually performs parts from her favorite films, awkwardly echoed by DJ Bertolucci, who splices footage from Godard and Bresson to clue in his audience to her desultory digressions. Insecure, Matthew stalls his nascent feelings for Isabelle and hides a photograph of the bikini-clad beauty somewhere in his crotch region (more on this later). The three enjoy languorous afternoons at the apartment, arguing over the respective genius of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, listening to Hendrix and Joplin. But all of this is backdrop to Isabelle and Theo’s favorite gametime activity: No-holds-barred cinema charades.

Pseudo-sadistic forays into cinephilia’s more perverse realms, the “games” get dirty, and the twins are merciless in assigning their sexually explicit “forfeits” for incorrect answers. Theo draws a blank on his sister’s Blond Venus impression and is promptly made to masturbate to (and on) the Blue Angel photo of Miss Dietrich that graces his door. Shocked, Matthew watches with an ambivalent Isabelle; any pride seems almost eclipsed by jealousy—she spends a little private time with the gooey remains after ordering the American out of the room.

At lunch, Theo assures Matthew that it’s all in good fun, or at least, that he wasn’t forced to do anything he didn’t want to do. Their cryptic conversation illuminates the connection that informs the film’s psychological underpinnings: Theo and Isabelle are twins, Siamese (though a scientific impossibility, a pair of scars on the formerly “adjoined” shoulders—beautiful scars, of course—give them away); male and female versions of the same person, intrinsically entwined. To make things creepier, there is a tangible sexual connection between the two. Aside from the suspect sleeping habits, Isabelle dubiously delights in wrestling with her brother and emerges more than once with a coy smile, breathing heavy and hard.

When the American fails to connect Theo’s histrionic collapse with the death scene in Howard Hawks’ Scarface, Matthew is made to mount his crush on the kitchen floor (after Isabelle, in a glorious big-screen experience, removes the photo of herself that cradles Matthew’s flaccid penis. Hello, NC-17). Terminally insouciant Theo makes eggs a few feet away. Outside on the street, the revolts heat up. Isabelle, it all too graphically turns out, is a virgin. Matthew is falling in love with her. And that’s when things get complicated.

The Dreamers is most successful as a film about the psychological connection between the strange set of twins, toying with a kind of cerebral incest. DP Fabio Cianchetti relays the tie in underappreciated mise-en-scene constructions: in one eerily baleful image, he captures a looming Theo through the window of a room in which Isabelle and Matthew are making love. A moment later, when Matthew questions Isabelle about the ostensibly physical relationship she’s forged with her brother, she responds, “….he’s never been inside me, Matthew…he’s always inside me.” Then, pushed to further consider the notion of sibling-sex, she states flatly, “I would kill myself.”

Matthew soon makes an effort to split the two apart, in protest to their detrimental dependency. He takes Isabelle on a date, just the two of them (and a film, of course) but upon their return to the apartment, they find that Theo’s got a girl of his own—an earlier scene reveals that she looks, as expected, just like his sister. Isabelle seems okay with the fact at first, and she and Matthew enter the heretofore unseen inner sanctum, her bedroom. It’s the playplace of the young girl with whom Isabelle is at odds; two teddy bears rest atop plush pillows. One can’t help but think back on Matthew’s objection to their earlier attempt at shaving his pubic hair (“You want to turn me into a little boy? Someone you can play games with?”). In the bedroom, Cinachetti’s camera again makes the sole offering of artistry, toying with the three panel mirrors that decorate the room, considering the personality disconnect that defines Isabelle’s splintered identity. She writhes topless, fragmented: the actress, the woman who loves Matthew, the little girl who loves her brother Theo? Isabelle is Bertolucci’s confused coquette, the question mark drowning in repressed opprobrium. The titillating she-tempest seethes when a song switch sounds from Theo’s adjoining room. She pounds his door, screaming self-reflexively at Matthew, “Who are you?”

But by that point, we’re not very interested who any of these people are.

Much of the Dreamers-related coverage has likened the film to Bertolucci’s second film, Before the Revolution. In fact, it seems the two have little in common beneath topographical similarities. The superior Revolution was made by a young philosopher with questions, with something he desperately wanted to say about change and ideas through an exploration of cinematic activism. The Dreamers is a film made by a man possessed of enough clichéd sentimentality that he’s willing to glorify the apathy and ineptitude of an otherwise active generation—one of the peculiarities of the film is that the revolt is always happening in the background. There’s more Mao in-frame than one can stomach, and yet there is something so apolitical about this film that the finale in the streets seems confused, not incendiary. It’s as if somewhere in the mix, somewhere between pleasing those invested in the Mattthew-Isabelle love story and sorting through his own psychological investment in the twins, Bertolucci removed the pejorative lens through which the examination of these three mediocrities might have culled resonance. Most surprisingly, the director states in press notes that he identifies with the characters in his film. I can only wonder: would the inspired youth who picked up his camera to make Revolution, take to the filmmaker he is today? Would he settle even as a viewer for the paltry offering he has made here? Like most, I only “know” the artist through his films, but one look at Before The Revolution and the answer is clear.

When you’re gauging how guilty this pleasure truly makes you feel, consider first the fact that a filmmaker who lived among cinema’s most inspiring insurgents opted to remind us of the do-nothings and left the revolution out in the street. If there was ever a time when we needed the masters to remind us that movies, art and politics matter, we are living it. What does resignation sound like? On the initial desire to make his movie about Paris ’68 as part of a continuation of the epic 1900, Bertolucci states, “Let’s be real. What was behind the film 1900? There was a big political hope—and today I cannot see anything at that temperature so I gave up.”
—MATTHEW PLOUFFE