the dreamers review
film by Bernardo Bertolucci (2003)
Us film people are not a pretty race. We aren’t tan because we bask in the glow of monitors. We aren’t fit because we’re sitting down most of the day. The healthiest thing we eat is popcorn. Most of us smell like moth balls. Some have us have been described as “Morlock adjacent.” Socially speaking, we do a little better because we have The Flicks and the occasional festival, but even then, you have to go: “Is this as cool as we get? Why can’t we be as hot and effortless as the people we watch in lights?”
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
February 23, 2025
The Dreamers is the ultimate in cineaste fantasy: a self-contained world where Film People look like Shampoo models, fuck constantly, and recline in decadent splendor, all on their parents’ dime. The sprawling apartment Bertolucci chose is, at risk of sounding cliché, a character in itself. It is as otherworldly and inviting as the apartment in Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex;” the Parisian intellectual’s wet dream, somewhere Sartre or Beauvoir would’ve held court.
Our trio is two Gallic little sex freaks (Louis Garrel, Eva Green) and a doe-eyed American kid (Michael Pitt). The kid is supposed to be the audience self-insert, and yes, he is in every way the Gallant from that Highlights comic. His saving grace is he’s as psychotically into film as his Parisian bed mates. Bertolucci’s most impressive achievement is making this live-action film devotion feel artful, cool, erotic. The idea of three layabouts playing out their favorite Godard or Buster Keaton or Truffaut sequences sounds, on its surface, deeply twee, almost embarrassing. I was seriously side-eyeing that premise when I read the plot summary. But God bless him, Bertolucci made me take it seriously! He made these kids seem impossibly… if not quite cool, then at least like the most memorable weekend away from your parents when you’re 18 and still think Camus is provocative.
Some of this is the performances yes, and they are all quite good, Eva Green especially. There is also the way Bertolucci splices in footage from (mostly black and white) film our beautiful youths are reenacting in color, some 10 or 30 years later. A lesser director would botch this. But the mirroring feels True.
Bertolucci’s camera is otherworldly. It’s a sexual phantom, just gliding in ways which feel like fingertips. I don’t understand the technicalities. I don’t know shit about film stock or lens gradations. All I know is it was the closest camera movements could approximate foreplay. Bertolucci: Sexual Dark Magician.
Right off the bat, this is a film which both normalizes and eroticizes nudity. I don’t think that’s quite a contradiction here. All the actors are walking around hanging dong or flashing bush, just doing banal household shit. But then something sets them off—which is essentially any household item or food product or Power Play—and they embark on an often hilarious but nonetheless steamy adventure. Perhaps, when you’re so disconnected from the barricades out in the street, when you truly have nothing to do but reenact “Jules and Jim,” all you sorta have left is kinky sex. I mean, that’s really the only fun thing you can do when you’re isolated in your parents’ apartment and there’s no internet yet.
This film is, thank fuck, not a treatise on the “youthful naivete” of the students who constructed barricades because their dormitories were like hovels. It is not about the intrepid souls who hurled Molotov cocktails in solidarity with the National Liberation Front. It is not about the tireless Renault workers who occupied shop floors, forging links with the Barricade Kids, which frankly is not talked about enough! It is not liberal revisionist historiography; “The kids were revolting because they wanted to listen to Hendrix and piss off their stuffy bourgeoisie parents!” It also isn’t a document of what it meant to struggle during those heady, impossible, genuinely revolutionary days before they were crushed by the pigs. It’s in the title: about horny adolescents living in a gauzy fantasy world. No more, no less.
Eva Green’s Isabelle is pulled in two directions: one in the safe, (too!) familiar arms of her adopted brother. He is perpetual adolescence, pillow forts at 19, never growing up, never reading a pamphlet. The other is in American Gallant’s arms, sodashop milkshake slurps, back half of the theater necking, all that boring American sexuality. Neither avenue feels particularly appealing to me. Yes, you can have threesomes till your parents get home—and don’t get me wrong, they seem fucking awesome—but goddamn girl, don’t you know there’s fucking beach under the cobblestones? There’s a whole world out there to win! Do you know the erotic charge of a brick in a cop’s face?
(Obviously, you can continue having threesomes after the barricades are built. We’re not Puritans here.)
The dialogue is less than stellar. It is, I will say, entertaining to hear. The average Parisian student of ’68 would balk at the lack of political education. They might also balk at the arrested development or that you could even entertain Clapton over Hendrix, Chaplin over Keaton. I did get a vague sense Bertolucci was embarrassed by some of it, but he was also reveling in the stupidity. He was also too busy filming the hottest people alive having the hottest sex possible in an apartment I would kneecap an orphan to spend a single hour in.
Bertolucci’s boldest political move is making the pigs genuinely threatening. We feel that icy skin prickle before truncheon swings, the faceless muscly blob of cop bodies, the terror they embody, De Gaulle’s willing executioners. I think your typical liberal director would’ve made the rebellion seem either “fun” or wasteful, ridiculous. Bertolucci says it’s terrifying but necessary.
Of course American Gallant blanches at the end, going all “defending yourself with cobblestones and Molotovs is also fascist.” Liberals never change. But our Gallic Sex Freaks transcend. They wake up. There is pleasure in a brick in a cop’s face.
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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