You do sense Bertolucci is trying to be honest about the shortcomings of that generation (born in 1940, he's a half-step older than the kids in the movie, and had already made his first great feature Before the Revolution (1964)), but the siblings' sexual proclivities don't broaden out to exemplify the era. The fact that the Molotov-cocktail-throwing brother and sister are spoiled adolescents who live at home might, but that isn't the main thrust. Altogether Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions is a more satisfying (and entertaining) example of '60s-generation self-critique.

Bertolucci's version of what used to be called the "international theme" is oddly more optimistic than it was in the hands of Henry James, whose new-world innocents were always brought up short in their confrontations with old-world corruption. In The Dreamers, by contrast, I believe the young American student is meant to get the better of the French boy in their arguments about Buster Keaton and Maoism. But this has little traction. Intellectualism makes a cameo appearance, but Bertolucci has always been more of a dreamer than a thinker.

This, however, is not a convincing dream. The whole thing feels unseemly, just as Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) did, not because these old men are making sexually graphic movies, but because they appear to wish they were still youngsters so they could be kinky in all the ways they never dared to (though Bertolucci still pulls back from homoeroticism, just as he did in The Conformist (1970)). As a result, The Dreamers comes across as both too flagrant and too repressed. Bertolucci is more entranced by what the characters do than by what drives them to do it. He drools over his young performers across the gap where the imaginative bridge should be but isn't.

The Dreamers is not an ordinary breed of dog (but by time I got my head around its unappealing muttliness I had lost the impulse to write). The flaws of the Meg Ryan boxing movie Against the Ropes are so obvious you could point to them with a two-by-four. Ryan plays a working-class woman who grew up in her father's boxing gym and who gets out of her demeaning job as a secretary to the sexist manager of the Cleveland sports arena, where her knowledge and talent are derided, by reshaping a thug she runs across into a successful fighter. The major problem is structural: it's a melodramatic chivalric romance with Ryan as the knight with a quest (to prove that she, as a woman, is the equal of any male manager) but the physical battles are displaced onto her fighter.

The movie goes belly up when the lady knight succumbs to the temptation of grabbing the spotlight from her protege and has to learn the lesson of humility. We're supposed to like her because she has the nerve and guts to break into a man's game, and then we're supposed to dislike her for the same reason, and then finally we're supposed to like her all over again when she apologizes to everybody and stays in the background. But since the fighter was never at the center of the story, the last third of the movie when Ryan has penitentially retreated from his corner has no center at all. While he's in the ring winning a brutal "personal" battle, we're supposed to be cheering for her because she's relegated herself to the dim margins, like the good girl we were earlier asked to like her for not being.