The Dreamers Review

It may be a beautifully made movie and the first feature film from Italian master Bernardo Bertolucci for 5 years, but "The Dreamers" is a disappointing and ultimately uninvolving cinematic experience. Based on Gilbert Adair's 1988 novel "The Holy Innocents," the plot finds naïve Yank teenager Matthew (Michael Pitt) doing his best at being bohemian in the Paris of 1968. At a street protest, Matthew runs into French twins Isabelle and Theo and is soon holed up with them in their family apartment for the summer while their parents are away on holiday. At first their games innocently revolve around their shared love of cinema, but soon more daring boundaries are crossed as the trio see how far they can push their emotional and sexual limits in an increasingly demanding series of mind games.

And, just as in Bertolucci's brilliant "Tango in Paris," sex takes up a large section of the running time of "The Dreamers". But whereas the carnal relations between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider served to show deeper motives in the 1973 film, here the constant bonking on display seems to be done purely for the sake of it, as we never get close enough to the capricious characters to understand them. Bertolucci's breathless depiction of the cinephiles' love of movies is, however, far more successful as he delightfully inserts clips and tributes to Godard, Garbo, Truffaut and co. But such celebration of cinemania is short-lived and by the time politics in the shape of the Paris riots of 1968 crash through the teenagers' apartment window in the final scene, Bertolucci's film has long lost the plot - and the audience.