Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 4

50 First Dates and Starsky & Hutch are movies I could send people to. Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the giants among movie directors, but there's no way I could recommend The Dreamers. Set during the Paris riots of May 1968, which were triggered by the attempt to fire Henri Langlois from the Cinematheque Francaise, it shows the involvement of an American student abroad with an incestuous, left-wing, movie-loving brother and sister. When Bertolucci made his masterpiece Last Tango in Paris (1972) starring Marlon Brando, he was imagining his way through taboos in character. His mind was as engaged as his other organs. In The Dreamers he looks back nostalgically at the '60s, which stand for revolutionary spirit in a tiresomely familiar way, but the taboos don't have much currency (e.g., tonguing the sleep out of someone's eye; soaking in a bath reddened with menstrual blood). Bertolucci tries too hard to be transgressive in so many ways that the relationships never cohere in a realistic sense or draw us in as fantasies.

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.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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