While it was fun to watch Jean Pierre Léaud recreate his fevered reading of Jean Luc Godard's famous anti-establishment text outside the La Cinematheque Francaise during the week running up to the May 1968 uprising in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci's sleek and dryly sex-obsessed The Dreamers contains hardly another passionate moment despite the full frontal nudity, both male and female, and the screenplay adapted by Gilbert Adair from his own out-of-print novel The Holy Innocents.

As usual Bertolucci's fear of the possibility of gay sex seems paradoxically tangential — a spectator could hardly deny the possibility was there and it's all over the source material but nobody's doing any — and yet that fear determines and is reflected in the disjointed editing and confused character development. In a 70s interview with Gerald Peary Bertolucci confesses, revealingly : "I've been in Freudian analysis for eight years and I think 'adult' homosexuality is an impossible contradiction. It can't exist." Not for you, maybe. Under the eye of a less coy and more self-aware director the actors might have been able to commit to their characters' confusion; instead, it's replaced by a sketchy project on the part of the American guy, played tentatively by Michael Pitt, to change the French perverts. And this despite Bertolucci's obvious francophilia.

Aside from the brief appearance by Léaud I didn't buy a single element of the milieu, most especially not the depiction of the student riots that erupt at the end of the film. In a 70s essay published in the Chicago-based radical film journal Jump Cut about Bertolucci's considerably more accomplished if equally coy The Last Tango in Paris a certain French filmmaker and critic is quoted as characterizing Tango's directing style as getting "fucked up the ass but refusing to come." If only The Dreamers were even that committed; it's more like an interrupted hand job with so much lube you can't feel a thing. To my mind one of 2003's most overrated films.