"The Dreamers"

"The Dreamers" isn't a pessimistic film; it's a melancholy one -- and an elating one. This is the most playful film Bertolucci has ever made, a surprise considering the source. The screenplay for "The Dreamers" was adapted by Gilbert Adair from his 1988 novel "The Holy Innocents," a rewrite of Jean Cocteau's "Les enfants terribles" ("The Holy Terrors"). Cocteau's novel appeared in France in 1929 and was exquisitely filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1949, six years before Rosamond Lehmann's English translation appeared.

Cocteau's novel is a story of the cursed enchantment of a pair of pampered, narcissistic siblings who live in their own self-created fantasy world. Luring a male friend, whom they adore and despise in equal measure, into their games, Paul and Elisabeth set themselves, their friend Gerard, and a young woman who makes them a foursome, on a course of self-destruction. There's a hothouse morbidity to both the book and Melville's film. When I saw it about 20 years ago, it made me feel as if I were gasping for air. It's both rarefied and voluptuous; it teeters on the same edge that flowers do between the time they exude their headiest perfume and the smell of corruption they give off as they rot.

Adair reset the novel in the Paris of May 1968, a few months after the tumult that followed the dismissal of the Cinémathèque's curator Henri Langlois by De Gaulle's minister of culture Andre Malraux, and at the time when student demonstrations had spiraled into a general strike, with 10 million Frenchmen, from laborers to professionals, walking off their jobs. Keyed into the elevated tone of Cocteau's poetic depravity, Adair wrote a gamier, funnier, more overtly sexual novel, which is why the tragic ending he supplied felt more like obeisance to "Les enfants terribles" than suited to the story he was telling. Bertolucci must have sensed that. He and Adair have lightened the tone of the book here, and the lightness is the key not only to why the film feels so freeing, but why it frees Bertolucci as a director. The trio's games no longer take a Sadean detour, and Matthew no longer becomes Isabelle and Theo's "martyred angel." If there's anything perverse about "The Dreamers" it's that a story of shared obsession and sexual manipulation has become bittersweet -- and it feels right that way.

Isabelle and Theo's parents having gone to the country, and Matthew having moved in, the three spend most of their time in the bourgeois warren of the family apartment, oblivious to the events outside. With movies their only true religion and the Cinémathèque still closed by order of the authorities, there is, to their minds, nowhere for them to go. So they create their own movie.

They start out enacting scenes from "Scarface" or "Blonde Venus" as part of a game they call "Name the Film." And they move on to scenes of their own devising, paid as forfeit by whoever fails at the game. With their desire to shock their American visitor, and each other, Isabelle and Theo keep raising the stakes, going about their game with the serious frivolity of children at play. Isabelle challenges Theo to masturbate in front of her and Matthew while she caresses her brother's bottom with a feather duster. (Theo kneels before a still of Dietrich in "The Blue Angel" like a penitent at prayer.) As payback, Theo challenges Matthew and Isabelle to make love in front of him. And Matthew, a kid too enraptured by his movie-fed fantasies to have made many friends, is so in love with both of them, so happy to find this sophisticated pair who share his obsessions, that he makes the mistake of thinking Isabelle and Theo regard him as an equal. (They're so umbilically joined, they even have matching strawberry birthmarks on their arms.)

The incest of the book has become mere cuddling here (Isabelle and Theo share a bed like babes in the woods), and the movie only hints that Matthew's sexual passion also extends to Theo. But those choices don't diminish the impact of what we do see and, dramatically, they don't lessen the inevitable tensions that spring up when Matthew's presence threatens the bond between the siblings. Sex is a potent force here, the most potent force -- disruptive as well as liberating. One of the most beautiful moments in the movie occurs after Matthew and Isabelle first make love and he's shocked to find that he's taken her virginity. (That Theo knew his sister was a virgin when he dared her to make love to Matthew is part of the cruelty of his challenge.) Matthew's hands covered in Isabelle's blood, he clasps her face and kisses her as if he's worshiping a goddess for her sacrifice. This is the kind of excessive romanticism that Bertolucci is capable of, the kind that can make you dizzy.

Bertolucci has long been infatuated with the sensual possibilities of decay. The apartments in "Last Tango" and "Besieged," and the apartment of "The Dreamers," a ramshackle womb, all share the same scarred wood and peeling paint. Fabio Cianchetti (who also shot "Besieged") has shot the film in warm colors, golds and dark blood-reds. This is the sensual richness you expect from Bertolucci, and it makes the trio's haven even more inviting; you're drawn into it as they are, away from the world outside. Lounging together in the bathtub, the three of them are as coolly indolent as sleeping cats.

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