Release Date: February 6, 2004
Starring: Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green
Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by: Gilbert Adair
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: NC-17 (explicit sexual content)
There is a strange, temporal disconnectedness in being a film critic: because of advance screenings for studio movies and platformed releases for independent ones, I often find myself watching films “out of order,” that is, forced to consider two or three movies together for no other reason than having seen them shortly after one another. With Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, for instance, I found myself thinking of the movie in comparison to The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s well publicized religious drama, and The Girl Next Door, a teen sex comedy, all of which -- on the surface, at least -- could not be more dissimilar.
I mention this because years and even months from now it will not be apparent why I make these connections, although I will explain them shortly. But suffice it to say that in the strange, temporal disconnectedness of being a film critic, these three movies have been mashed together in one block of movie history in my mind, for no other reason than that I saw them shortly after one another.
First: The Dreamers is about sex, the movies, and revolution, set in Paris during the spring and summer of 1968. It begins with the dismissal of Henry Langlois, the founder and director of the Cinematheque François, an event which sparked a cultural revolution that ends the movie with iconic images of police in riot gear forming barricades in the streets and angry young protestors hurling Molotov cocktails from behind overturned automobiles.
In the midst of this are an American student, Matthew (Michael Pitt), and two French twins, Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), whom Matthew meets and befriends at the cinematheque shortly before everything gets crazy. He moves out of his dingy hotel room and into their spacious apartment, where the three of them begin a delirious descent into an oblivious, extended orgy of sex and philosophy, unaware of the changes going on right outside their windows.
In both The Dreamers and The Girl Next Door, the main character is a naïve, unassuming young man who is slightly intimidated by the world around him. Things get interesting, then, when, in both cases, this young man is introduced to a more sexually experienced young girl who encourages him to do a variety of things -- some of them mentionable, some of them not (and more so in The Dreamers) -- under the pretense of broadening his horizons. Needless to say, these are two very different movies, and the characters and plot proceed in very different directions from this same basic premise. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the vast gulf between the two; by the end credits it hardly seems possible that at one point there were similarities between the saccharine bubble gum flavor of The Girl Next Door and the earthy, gritty taste of The Dreamers.
You see, Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo are bound together by their love of the movies, an adoration that was common at that time and in that place but will seem peculiar to modern-day audiences (indeed, as the film critic Roger Ebert has written, the movie will lose some of its nostalgic luster for most moviegoers who were not alive in the late 1960’s). “The first time I saw the Cinematheque François, I thought, only the French would put a movie theater in a palace,” Matthew gushes at the beginning of the movie, as though he has finally found the place where he really belongs. Isabelle and Theo are equal to his enthusiasm, and soon after moving in with them he discovers they have an ongoing trivia game about the movies’ most obscure moments, the sort of questions answerable only by the obsessive cinemaphiles who sit in the front row at the Cinematheque François.
But this game has a darker edge: The price for being unable to answer one of the questions is the performance of a humiliating or degrading act, as when Isabelle makes Theo masturbate in front of Matthew, and later when Theo demands that Isabelle have sex with Matthew in front of him. It soon becomes clear that Matthew really has no part in this game; he is only a pawn to be moved around by Isabelle and Theo. The game also opens a window onto the bizarre and slightly disturbing intimacy that Isabelle and Theo share, to the point where they sleep naked together in the same bed.
Matthew is aware, of course, that Isabelle and Theo are leading lives that have a disconnectedness of their own, in this case from the real world, although he is mostly powerless to do anything about it. Pitt plays Matthew with the same kind of exasperated, perfunctory reluctance, like a brakeman who knows that he cannot slow the train but squeezes the brake handle out of duty, anyway. He has essentially the same role that he played in Murder by Numbers, which was then considered a breakout performance of sorts, but if this is any indication of his range then his future in Hollywood is surely very limited.
Nevertheless, movies like The Dreamers need a player like Pitt to be the patsy, the fall guy, the dunce, because for all of his idealistic protests and exhortations, he still gets caught up in the sexual mouse trap that Theo and Isabelle have constructed with a cunning that is just barely apparent. Thus the sinister edge to the same sex-initiation routine that (oh, yes) The Girl Next Door plies to more lighthearted results.
Now as viewers surely know, in the United States The Dreamers is rated NC-17 for explicit sexual content, this country’s most restrictive classification and one rarely seen on theatrical releases because it strangles a movie’s chances for commercial success (only filmgoers 17 and older are admitted) outside of the art-house circuit. I do not intend to argue that this classification is undeserving, for there is indeed explicit sexual content throughout the movie; once the three leads have locked themselves in the apartment, there is a casual air of sexuality that is refreshing for its honesty but certainly not suitable (or at least questionable) for younger viewers.
At the same time, however, The Passion of the Christ is playing to American audiences with an R rating attached (for graphic violence). One step below NC-17, it allows moviegoers of any age to see the movie as long as they are accompanied by an adult. While it is probably true that the images of extensive torture and execution are more easily processed by younger viewers -- American entertainment in all forums is filled with violence -- relatively speaking, the examples of violence in The Passion are just as severe as the sexuality in The Dreamers. It is an interesting but predictable commentary on American values that the latter received the more restrictive rating, for the Motion Picture Association of America, which assigns the letter classifications, has a long-documented history of permitting filmmakers much greater leeway with violence than with sexuality. In fact, most moviegoers do not know that a movie could (theoretically) be rated NC-17 for violence or language just as easily as it could for sexuality, nor that NC-17 does not necessarily equal pornography (in fact, the MPAA used to use the X rating, until that letter became overly appropriated by pornographers).
Perhaps the reason there has not been much controversy over the assignation of the NC-17 classification, other than that The Dreamers unarguably deserves it, is that its content is of utter inconsequence to anyone under the age of 17. Or under the age of 50, for that matter. Really, all of the sex and revolution in this movie are part of a smokescreen constructed by Bertolucci, whose film is, at its most basic level, a postcard from the past with a nostalgic message for those who might’ve been in the vicinity of Paris in the late 1960’s. The rest of the audience (except for maybe the Bertolucci devotees) will be left clueless, but the implication is that The Dreamers is not for such viewers, anyway.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)