"The Dreamers"

For viewers old enough to remember the events of May '68, to have taken part in them or to have watched as sympathetic observers from the rest of the world, "The Dreamers" may seem a trivialization of the politics of the time. It's true that Bertolucci and Adair are not much interested in the specifics of the issues that drove the students into the streets. (It's likely that most of the countrymen who followed them didn't much care about those issues either.) The bottom line is that the demonstrators and strikers were responding to a chance at freedom.

What Bertolucci and Adair honor in "The Dreamers" is the deliriousness that comes through in the memoirs and slogans and fiction that month inspired, a joy that not even the tear gas and beatings dispensed by the CRS, the paramilitary police anti-riot squad, could fully dissipate. A revolution that expressed itself in graffitied poetry like "All power to the imagination," "I decree the state of permanent happiness," and "Beneath the pavement, the beach," could never be fully defined or contained by any political ideology. "Shining faces" is the way British novelist Jill Neville, who was there, described the people she saw in Paris that month in her 1969 novel "The Love Germ," people who looked to her "as if they were living in the present, as if the present were no longer a wearisome assembly line that had to be hastened on and got out of the way. And in his book "Lipstick Traces," Greil Marcus described the atmosphere as this: "There was only public happiness; joy in discovering for what drama one's setting is the setting, joy in making it."

It may be offensive to veterans of the time to compare the nascent revolutionary movement that swept through France to the playacting of adolescents. But Bertolucci and Adair are teasing out a connection between their trio's sense of discovery and the sense of discovery in the streets. Had Bertolucci used "The Dreamers" to mourn a generation's lost revolutionary fervor he would have betrayed the very spirit he is honoring here. That approach could easily have seemed as if the director were using the '60s as a club with which to belittle and shame the generations that followed (as other '60s veterans have, using their memories of the '60s in the way the staid respectability of the '50s was used against them). Instead of forcing his actors to live up to unapproachable icons, Bertolucci has given them the freedom to find their own personas. (In a report on the shooting in the January issue of "Sight & Sound," Gilbert Adair writes that instead of character being the bottle actors are poured into, actors must be the vessels in which characters find their own shape.)

One of the joys of "The Dreamers" is the way that this approach frees Bertolucci. The wooziest parts of his movies have always been the ones having to do with politics. The split in the director has always been between his Marxist beliefs and his romantic-sensualist nature. In "The Last Emperor" he may have wanted us to believe that Pu Yi was happier when he was "reeducated" to be a simple gardener for Mao. But it was obvious Bertolucci's heart was in the scenes of Pu Yi's life as a decadent playboy, or tussling beneath a silk sheet with his two wives. And he may have tried to make the agrarian masses the heroes of "1900," but their toil and the fantasy triumph of these honest peasants in the film didn't look nearly as much fun as Dominique Sanda, one of the corrupt ruling class, snorting cocaine in a swank hotel room with her gay uncle.

Here, for perhaps the first time since "Before the Revolution" (made when he was only 22), Bertolucci is willing to acknowledge the discontents of political commitment. And because he's older now, he can acknowledge those discontents with affectionate humor instead of the self-critical guilt his films sometimes seemed to indulge in, as if he were chastising himself for his own political shortcomings, using film as a tool in his own revolutionary reeducation. (At those moments Bertolucci would have done well to have remembered another slogan from May '68: "Boredom is always counterrevolutionary.")

Bertolucci has been where these characters are, and that's what lets him love them. He knows that, in the young, dedication to anything -- politics or art or what have you -- goes hand in hand with narcissism and superiority. The compromises the young will have to make are, for them, inseparable from corruption. That's why Bertolucci allows some sympathy for Robin Renucci as the siblings' father, a celebrated poet who feels it is not a poet's place to sign petitions and thinks his children's belief that demonstrations will change the world is a pipe dream. He speaks in the superior tones of the literateur who has placed himself above the world. But he also knows something his kids don't, and we see his hurt when Theo tells him cruelly, "I never want to be like you." (Though in this movie, it's not the kids who lose their innocence, but the parents.)

Bertolucci realizes that to love the young, to celebrate them as he is celebrating them here, means accepting that narcissism and untested self-assurance are part of what gives them their glow. Bertolucci understands that sometimes folly is inseparable from glory. Isabelle and Theo are both worldly and naive, and Bertolucci suggests that there is something of the closed-off world they inhabit in the utopian dreams of the students and strikers passing by their windows, pulling up the cobblestones to make barricades, writing "Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible" on walls. He's aware of the differences. (The students who got their heads bashed in by the CRS were not playacting.) But when Theo encourages Matthew to think of Mao as a film director making an epic with a cast of millions, and Matthew says he's frightened by the idea of a cast of millions acting as identical extras, all in the same uniform, chanting the same slogans, you feel that, at last, Bertolucci has freed himself from an old vexing fixation.

It's not the student masses in the street who are the heroes here, the way the peasants were in "1900," it's Isabelle and Theo, spoiled and narcissistic and casually cruel as they are, and Matthew. Their revolution may be taking place behind closed doors, but it is, however naive, however sheltered, their attempt to give all power to the imagination. When Bertolucci shows us protesters hurling Molotov cocktails, and the CRS charging in response, to the accompaniment of Edith Piaf singing "Non, je ne regrette rien," it's a moment that fuses parody and love and pride. He's linking the demonstrators to a strain of French romantic self-dramatization, and he's saying that he regrets nothing. "The Dreamers" is his tenderest film, a salute and a valentine to comrades, whether they were on the barricades or in the dark of movie theaters. To take a line from an earlier generation of French revolutionaries, he's made a dream that loves its dreamers.

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