Unlike the rest of his filmography, for the initial credits
of Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968) François Truffaut introduced a
dedication and a visual reference that are directly related to the events that
took place in Paris during the filming of his movie (Stolen Kisses). The dedication, written
with his own hand, is offered to Henri Langlois, founder and director of the
French Cinematheque, while the visual reference is to the gate of the same
entity in the palace of Chaillot, where a note that is found that reads closed
until future news.
Now back to the Dreamers, it is to that same gate Isabelle
seems to be chained, one of the protagonists of The Dreamers . This film is
directed by the Italian maestro Bernardo Bertolucci. Isabelle, her twin brother
Theo and a young American man, Matthew, t hey met there, they are part of the
huge group of moviegoers who in February 1968 crowded around the film library
to protest the dismissal of Langlois, sparked by a power struggle in the city.
Several people were involved like Pierre Moinot, president of the film library,
André Holleaux, head of the National Center for Cinematography and the culture
minister, André Malraux.
In 1968, Truffaut interrupted the filming of Stolen Kisses
to actively participate in the protests, which reached a climax on February 14,
when the police confronted the nearly three thousand demonstrators grouped
around the palace of Chaillot. ----May 68 had been anticipated a few months for
the film community, through pressures, letters of solidarity from directors and
actors around the world, and the virulent denunciations of the publication Cahiers
du Cinéma group in other media, managed to reinstate Langlois in his position
at the end of April. The start of the union protests and strikes in May
coincided with the opening of the Cannes Festival, which was forced to cancel
in solidarity with the movement that took place in Paris.
In the Dreamers, Bertolucci wanted to capture that era in
his film with a combination of elements: being young, being a movie buff, being
in Paris and living in 1968. However the Dreamers is not a historical film. The Langlois affair
underlies only as a backdrop, as a reason for the relationship between Isabelle (Eva Green, in her film debut), Theo (Louis
Garrel, the son of the great French director Philippe Garrel) and Matthew
(Michael Pitt ), which is the true theme of the film. The director does,
without a doubt, a tribute to the era and the intoxication of cinema in which
many young people lived. As if it were a hallucinogen, the images on the big
screen excite them, make them fly, transport them. Isa states that she was really
born in 1959 and that her first words were "New York Herald Tribune",
the same as Jean Seberg vociferates on the Champs Elysees in Breathless (A bout
de souffle, 1960) by Godard. We believe her, many women were born to life with
that free and mysterious image of Seberg, who proposed to them a new model of
life.
Matthew (Michael Pitt) is a young American who lives in
Paris as an exchange student, there he meets the university students Isabelle
(Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), two brothers obsessed with film and very
involved in the French May. Isabelle and Theo, whose parents are traveling,
invite him to leave his hotel and live with them. There he discovers that they
are Siamese twins and that they have a strange and unclassifiable relationship.
The three initiate a sexual relationship marked by the
veiled attraction between the two boys and between the brothers among
themselves. Matthew, who ends up getting involved in a protest demonstration
with violent confrontations with the police, is the weak part of that trio and
ends up realizing that the political ideals and psychological behavior of the
brothers are incompatible with his relationship with Isabelle. Incest, probably
the greatest taboo that exists in the West and polyamorous relations are
present throughout the film. 15 years ago there was no talk of this type of
love and Bertolucci, director of feelings and sexualities, dared to name it
with a film as uncomfortable as it is beautiful.
A model for life. That was the cinema for them, that in
their cinephilia they did not see another valid representation. They sought to
transgress what was established by a reality dominated by their elders, they
wanted to be like the actors and stars they admired, to recreate the scenes of
their favorite movies, to discuss movies, to think about movies, to eat movies,
to get drunk on celluloid. They were not people, they were characters in a film
playing a role. Victims of the contagion of a disease transmitted by eye
contact, all three have no remedy. Bertolucci takes pleasure in showing us that
frenzy in which they wander, interspersing the protagonist trio with clips from
the films they evoke, in a beautiful montage where we get a glimpse how deeply tattooed
was film on their skin. They are weird people, freaks like Tod Browning's
homonymous film that is cited in the film.
The three run through the Louvre trying to break the record
set by the trio of Band of Outsiders (Bande à part 1964), fight over the
pre-eminence between Chaplin and Keaton in the reign of the silent comedy or
braid in impossible riddles involving Top Hat (1935), Queen Christina (1933),
Blonde Venus (1932) and Scarface (1932). More than living, they imitate, they
represent, they dream. Eric Rohmer said it, recalling his time as a film
writer: "We did not live. Life was the screen, it was the movies, it was
to discuss and write about them."
But every philia has its evil side and Bertolucci knows it.
From its name, The dreamers is an escapist work and for that reason the
characters decide to flee from the reality in which they live and give
themselves to some private and perverse games to which the cinema has perhaps
taken them, or at least- has convened. With the closed cinemateque, they seem
to have lost the thread that has united them to the world and they are enclosed
in themselves, inside the huge apartment that Isa and Theo's parents leave in
their care. Bertolucci releases the ties and the ballast, and the balloon in
which the trip begins to rise to infinity. As I have mentioned previously, the
episode of the protests around the cinemateque was only an apology (but no less
successful, even Bertolucci got the actors Jean Pierre Léaud and Jean Pierre
Kalfon recreate their active roles they had in those days). The director wants
to look closely at his characters, study them, learn how far they are able to
reach in that perverse sexual game in which they descend in a dangerous spiral.
Many have criticized Bertolucci for having missed the
opportunity to show us his version of what happened in that spring of 68, but
the same happened with Truffaut: Stolen Kisses is not a politically compromised
work. Antoine, his protagonist, is enamored and undecided and works as a hotel
porter and then as a detective. No political statements, no awareness, no
philosophical manifestos. The cinema reflects the world of its director, not
necessarily the real world. Bertolucci does not want to chronicle Langlois, he
wants to show a film about three people who lived there and who shared a
special and complex connection.
As in The Last Tango in Paris (1972), the isolation of the
characters is the trigger that leads them to explore themselves, in a perverse
game that leads Isa and Theo to the limits of incest, initiating Matthew into a
forced sexual awakening that at first it makes him drunk, but then rejects it,
when things are taking a less clear course. However, unlike the film with Marlon
Brando and Maria Schneider, the attitude of the director towards the behavior
of the characters of the Dreamers is very compassionate, completely idealized,
without judging or criticizing them. And that same attitude is that of his gaze:
the camera of Fabio Cianchetti, with his sensual palette, embellishes the actions
to a degree in which it is more about an aesthetic complacency than a faithful
approach to the real, stripping the images of everything that indicate how low
they are falling in their personal degradation. What actually happens only we
see when the twins’ parents come back home and they find the three asleep,
intertwined in the middle of the chaos they have converted the apartment and that only now we seem to
perceive, now that we have awakened from the hypnotic dream in which we were.
That is what Bertolucci led us to: imagine that everything
was possible, that utopias were viable and that the revolution was crossing the
street. That sex, politics and cinema were a precise combination. When in reality
we were naked and didn’t know it: "Then both of their neyes were opened,
and they knew they were naked so they put together fig leaves and made
aprons," this is what the biblical text reminds us. The director awakens
us from the youthful dream we had. Now we are adults, now the streets are full
of demonstrators. We join them knowing that nothing will ever be the same
again, that what we dreamed has ended. The movie came to an end. The projector
went out, someone turned on the lights of the theater. It's time to leave: life
awaits us.
Directed by Bernardo
Bertolucci
Produced by Jeremy
Thomas
Screenplay by Gilbert
Adair
Based on The
Holy Innocents by Gilbert Adair
Cast:
Michael Pitt Matthew
Eva Green as Isabelle
Louis Garrel as Théo
Anna Chancellor as Mother
Robin Renucci as Father
Jean-Pierre Kalfon as Himself
Jean-Pierre Leaud as Himself
Florian Cadiou as Patrick
Pierre Hancisse as First buff
Valentin Merlet as Second buff
Lola Peploe as The Usherette
Ingy Fillion as Théo's girlfriend
