"The Dreamers"

Bernardo Bertolucci's uncut NC-17 film may be the most explicit film ever released by an American studio, but there's much more to it than just hot sex

By Charles Taylor

Feb 6, 2004 | Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers" contains what may be the most startling first kiss in the movies. Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American student trawling around Paris during the spring of 1968, is taken under the wing of Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), twins he's met during his nightly devotional sojourns to the Cinémathèque Française. One evening, they take Matthew home to their parents' rambling apartment for a dinner en famille. Isabelle and Theo's parents retire for the evening, leaving the three young people to themselves. Making her way to bed, Isabelle leans over to kiss Matthew goodnight, and as she does a candle flickering on the kitchen table catches her long, raven hair on fire.

The action is both dreamy and superfast. The film blurs and, for a split second, goes into slow motion, much the way our senses do in the seconds before a first kiss. Time stretches out, as it does at the approach of ecstasy or calamity. Matthew instinctively claps the flame out between his hands, Isabelle's own hands cover his, and, their faces close, they drink each other in longingly before she leans in for her kiss.

The moment is a wonderful joke, Bertolucci's equivalent of the scenes in old movies where lovers finally kiss and fireworks erupt in the sky above their heads. Matthew and Isabelle, lovers-to-be, literally spark when they first draw near each other. And yet it's anything but a joke. That one moment -- the hint of danger, the plunge of adolescent romance, the shiver of the erotic -- holds the promise of all of the movie to come. And it's a promise that Bertolucci and his fearless trio of young actors keep.

The release of "The Dreamers" in its uncut form in this country represents a triumph for Bertolucci, who, it was thought, would have to cut the film to gain an R rating. And it represents an act of real guts on the part of its distributor, Fox Searchlight (the specialty division of Twentieth Century Fox), who stood up to the kangaroo court of the MPAA ratings board and elected to accept an NC-17 classification. Whatever you think of "The Dreamers," Fox Searchlight has struck a blow for adult moviegoers in America, and honor is due it.

During the 1960 obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in England, a young literary scholar named Richard Hoggart was asked on the stand if the most explicit of Lawrence's words gained anything by being printed as "f___." "Yes," he answered, "it gains a dirty suggestiveness." This surely is what would have happened to "The Dreamers" had Bertolucci been held to his contract requiring him to cut the film to earn an R rating. Real sex makes it to the screen so seldom that it is freeing to see actors allowed to do what lovers do in real life: enjoy each other's scents, juices, contours. When Michael Pitt lies with his head on Eva Green's crotch, nuzzling her pubic hair with his nose or twirling it between his fingers, you feel the bracing pleasure of having common experience acknowledged on the screen. Art isn't always about telling us what we don't know. It's also about publicly telling us what, because of politeness or our own timidity, we don't admit to knowing.

I hesitate to say that this is the most explicit film ever released by an American studio (though it is) because I don't want people flocking to "The Dreamers" expecting hot stuff. Some of the people who flocked to Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" professed themselves disappointed that it wasn't as explicit as they'd expected, that it wasn't "Deep Throat." The erotics of "Last Tango" depended not just on the sex but on the willingness of Bertolucci and Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider not to hold back, their willingness to delve into the psychology of sex in all its bitterness, anger and greed, to give us the selfishness as well as the communion between these two people.

The eroticism of "The Dreamers" is of course in the sex itself, and in the lovely unself-consciousness with which Michael Pitt, Eva Green and Louis Garrel walk around in the nude. There's a charming moment when Isabelle pulls down Matthew's pants to find a snapshot of her in a bathing suit curled around his penis, and she thanks him for his gallantry in keeping her "next to his heart." But the eroticism is also in the clash of the conflicting desires being played out in the trio's games, in the adolescent bravado they use to goad each other on. "The Dreamers" isn't, like "Last Tango," about the bitterness of adult sex, the fearfulness of reaching middle age and finding desire still as strong and confusing and destructive as ever. All those emotions may lie in wait for Matthew and Isabelle and Theo when they are adults. "The Dreamers" is about sexual discovery as a drug, the moment when fantasies start to play themselves out in reality and make reality pale by comparison.

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