Back before Mel Gibson figured out how to market a splatter flick through the evangelical community, the immediate controversy in film was over Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, The Dreamers. Is it Bertolucci’s best film in years, as some critics have claimed, or so campily bad that it’s unintentionally funny? The answer, as it happens, is neither, really. Although it has elements in it that enable you to see where both positions are grounded.

 

The set up is this. Matthew, a twentyish American from San Diego, is spending the spring of 1968 studying abroad in Paris. There he is adopted – that’s really the right word – by some twins who share his passion for cinema. When Isabelle & Theo’s parents – dad is a poet (as was Bertolucci’s father) – depart for a month in the country, the twins coax Matthew to live in their roomy Parisian flat. There, after learning that Isabelle & Theo sleep together, Matthew is “seduced” – tho if the genders were reversed, it would border on rape – and the three become enmeshed in a claustrophobic world of erotic exploration that ends, after Isabelle has very nearly killed all three of them, when the street riots of that spring literally intrude in the form of a brick through the window. Matthew, whose anti-Vietnam War feelings have brought him closer to a pacifist’s position than the Molotov-cocktail tossing Theo, can’t handle the conflict & turns away. End of story.

 

 Except that this synopsis tells you almost nothing of what is really going on. For example, central to the infatuation of all the movie’s champions are the ways in which the three film-obsessed kids are constantly viewing themselves & the world as an endless series of quotations of favorite film moments. Bertolucci indulges this side of the film, especially during the first hour, without restraint & there are fabulous moments in which the film’s action is intercut with the very moments of film history to which it refers (a run through the Louvre, a Garbo scene). My favorite such moment, tho, is a scene that mimics Godard almost perfectly as Theo reads from revolutionary theory underneath giant leftwing posters as Matthew attempts to argue theory with him.

 

But the deeper tale is the one of the psycho-sexual entanglements of the three characters. The film – the first NC-17 rating for a film in the U.S. since Henry and June – could have been produced as a play, its three main figures wandering about the apartment in various states of undress. And it’s here that the film’s detractors find the grist for their mill. For a film about three nubile youngsters obsessed with sex & each other, the sex in this film is just dreadful. If this were a Hollywood film, the three would be comically inept. But in this French-Italian-American production, they’re just incompetent. Combine this with the overly pompous pseudo-profundities that all three use to grope around their thoughts & feelings and you can see why one critic, Liz Penn, could write “If I were 20 years old and bursting with cinematic passion (or just wanted to pretend I was), I'd gladly line up on a Saturday at midnight to yell snarky things at the screen.”

 

This, however, is a misreading of the film. It seems quite clear that Bertolucci, who has covered aspects of this territory before in Last Tango in Paris & Stealing Beauty, intends the three to be just this bad. It’s the visual presentation of inexperience & this film is precisely about the desire for experience coming up against the reality of practice. Bertolucci is attracted to these hinge conditions, as if trying to identify a membrane that, once crossed, can never be reversed. In Stealing Beauty, Liv Tyler’s virginity is so palpable to the other characters one almost expects to see it listed among the players in the credits. Debra Winger’s confrontation with North Africa as Other in The Sheltering Sky represents the same sort of passage (and, not coincidentally, got the same sort of divided reception that has greeted The Dreamers*).

 

But where the film gets lost, it seems to me, is in Bertolucci’s inability to fully grasp the relationship of the three main characters. Where this is most clear is in the role of Theo, which is never well defined & which becomes more & more peripheral to the film as Isabelle & her American attempt to reinvent the kama sutra, even tho he is the one who must take the decisive act in the final scene that sunders the trio for good. I’ve seen The Dreamers characterized as a drama of sexual obsession & compared with Last Tango – Liz Penn’s review is entitled “Worst Tango in Paris,” no less – or with the true masterpiece of this genre, Ai No Corrida. I’ve also seen The Dreamers characterized as a ménage à trois film, and that’s not right either. Isabelle may sleep with her brother, literally sleep, & they may enjoy watching each other’s sexual activity, but, as Matthew discovers to his surprise, she is still technically a virgin at the start of the film.

 

Rather, The Dreamers is a tale of what happens to a folie à deux when it is disrupted by the intrusion of an outside influence (just as the brick through the window disrupts Isabelle’s attempt to gas the trio, letting in some fresh air). Folie à deux is a specific psychiatric disorder, notable in that it requires more than one individual. But it’s also a type that we’ve seen all too often in recent society, in everything from the Branch Dividians to the Manson Family to the Weather Underground. The chief linguistic aspect of a folie à deux is that it’s always a closed language system. Contradictory information cannot penetrate from outside. Thus you can find it in couples under the spell of a sexual obsession – Ai No Corrida is a good example – but in broader social phenomena as well, including any group whose inner discourse reinforces an insider code & keeps the outer world at bay. It’s the discursive characteristic of sects of all kinds.

 

But the classic film – and Bertolucci should have known this – of the disruption of such a closed system is none other than Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which the presence of a new couple – “fresh meat” I believe is the phrase Albee uses – causes the corrosive symbiosis of George & Martha to implode. In Waco, it was the arrival of the ATF & FBI that intruded on David Koresh & his followers. In Jonestown, it only took a visit from a congressman & a few staffers to set off a chain that killed over 900 people. One wonders what it might take to intrude on the Bush national security apparatus, given that the president deliberately refuses to read newspapers so as not to spoil his worldview with data from the real. In the last administration to demonstrate these characteristics, it took a single guard noticing some Scotch tape on a door at the Watergate apartments to cause the whole delusion to unravel.

 

In The Dreamers, Matthew is the outside element. He never fully becomes a party to the mindset – it never becomes a folie à trois. But because Bertolucci so identifies with Matthew, he fails to give us enough insight into the critical relationship between the twins, which causes Theo to seem narratively adrift once Matthew & Isabelle have finally crossed that threshold of the flesh. It’s as if Mike Nichols had filmed Woolf by focusing on the relation not of Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha to Richard Burton’s George, but on her relationship to the George Segal character instead.

 

Intellectually, narratively, that’s an interesting project. But it’s not the movie that Bertolucci thinks he’s making. The result sort of mushes tropes & types together. This is true not just for Theo, whose role loses purpose for a large part of the film only to become decisive in the last five minutes, but for Matthew as well. It’s worth noting just how badly Bertolucci has envisioned the San Diegan here – what student/film buff in 1968 would show up in Paris in a cheap suit & bad haircut? Matthew’s look is strictly 1950s. If this is intended to accentuate his differences with the hipper-than-Jean-Pierre-Leaud twins, it doesn’t work. The distinction between French & American youth culture by the late 1960s was not that one was hip, the other not, but rather that the two subcultures had very different definitions of what hip meant. Bertolucci almost approaches this in what is probably the key theoretical discussion of the film – Chaplin or Keaton, who was the better actor/comic? Matthew takes Keaton (as would I) & Theo is dumbfounded. Matthew reads Keaton as an author of his films & characters alike, while Theo – reduced here to a foil for Bertolucci’s identification with Matthew – offers a defense of Chaplin that is romantic & humanist, hardly a position one would have been likely to find circa 1968. Bertolucci’s real argument here is with cinema prior, say, to World War 2, but instead it comes off as clunky & pompous in the mouths of teenagers. Which is what happens, I guess, when you send in children to do the work of adults.

 

 

 

* For my money, it’s Bertolucci’s most successful film & easily the best role Winger will ever have.