By Armond White

First Tango in Paris
Bertolucci’s bathtub barricades.

The Dreamers
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci’s great gift for filmmaking is reconfirmed with his newest movie, The Dreamers. Evidence of that gift is always remarkable–think of the panorama that signifies "impermanence" in Little Buddha; the lovemaking on the train in The Conformist; the breathtaking wedding celebration in 1900; Brando’s savage-then-tender rant at the funeral brier in Last Tango in Paris; or the ominous, open-air lovemaking in The Sheltering Sky. Each scene is emotionally expressive and visually indelible. It’s impossible to separate The Gift from Bertolucci’s curiosity about the world and sensitivity to his characters’ emotional progression. The combination of those concerns is what makes Bertolucci’s filmmaking matter. He is one of the medium’s stylistic giants because he uses the camera and edits images in ways that invigorate our perception of human experience.

A Bertolucci film is about more than its ostensible subject. In The Dreamers the subject is May ’68, the moment cinephiles and student radicals were joined by the French workforce in a protest that shook the country and even shut down the Cannes Film Festival. Art and politics came together in events that galvanized a generation’s hopes. By looking back at that occurrence, Bertolucci adduces those dreams that every era’s seekers have in common. Young American Matthew (Michael Pitt) arrives in Paris to attend the Cinematheque, a haven for movie-obsessed youth of the mid-20th century. He meets a pair of siblings, Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), who share his movie passion. The May ’68 uprising parallels the trio’s curiosity about life. This is not a self-congratulatory Seabiscuit reminiscence lamenting "loss of innocence," but something more unusual–an exploration of sensibility.

Adapting film critic Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents (a personal combination of the roman á clef and bildungsroman genres), Bertolucci connects to a more obscure generic archetype: Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1950 film of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, the ultimate treatment of a brother and sister’s mad, insular infatuation. Through Matthew, Bertolucci invades that private bond, demonstrating a cross-cultural, ambisexual fascination that is a paradigm for movie love–the polymorphous perversity of one’s personal identity before it is defined. The story’s depth comes from Matthew, Isabelle and Theo responding to movies on a different level than simple buffdom; they don’t just emulate the extraordinary characters they see on screen but attempt to make their lives over according to the wonder and optimism they read into movie characters.

This obsession is different from the Hollywood prototype in which movie fans imitate movie stars as part of a commercialized ritual, the prototype that has led to a global crisis of fashionable, even propagandistic violence and nihilism. (Blame it on the unaddressed capitalist impulses of Hong Kong action movies, American action movies and Pulp Fiction.) The cinephiles of The Dreamers are in search of a moral purpose, not just personal capitalist gratification. Matthew, Isabelle and Theo experiment with their own emotions, their own bodies. Their childlike lack of boundaries is a sign of their innocence, not social indifference. Bertolucci turns Adair’s story into Cocteau-like drama. While Isabelle and Theo’s parents are away, Matthew is invited to join their games of citing film references and embarking on the sexual suggestions of the movies they have seen.

The deeper these experimenters go, the more the fairytale essence of their cultural and sexual folly becomes disturbing. Matthew’s American pragmatism turns into possessiveness; through the discovery of his own sexual pleasure and masculine need, he’s determined to make the brother-sister relationship fit a comfortable, familiar convention. Bertolucci doesn’t put Matthew in the wrong; rather, the American’s gradual maturity forces an inevitable, natural division between Isabelle and Theo. The tension that results in The Dreamers is unlike anything I can recall from other movies–not even Les Enfants Terribles, Almost Famous or The Royal Tenenbaums. Bertolucci penetrates his characters’–everyone’s–secret lives. It is a poignant, scary, original perception.

When the trio are in the bathtub together, their behavior is reflected in a three-plated mirror. A trademark Bertolucci composition: the three reflections shift each person’s place (right, center, left) within the same image. Not only does their interrelationship change; Bertolucci simply, visually, forces us to use our Freudian awareness: This playtime triangle won’t last. Adulthood and the politics of the outside world will have an inevitable effect. That’s what The Royal Tenenbaums missed. Wes Anderson’s tent scene (where Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson sought to escape to their youth) was ineffably sentimental but it compares poorly to Bertolucci’s tent scene, which hints at Matthew, Isabelle and Theo’s tragic lack of political consciousness.

Bertolucci concentrates on dreamers, not idlers. As with the characters of 1900, Little Buddha, Besieged, Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist, he’s interested in examining the special, splendid consequences of privilege. Matthew and Theo argue pop music as well as movies (Hendrix versus Clapton, a timely expression of each boy’s social engagement), but these are passions more than political positions. The Dreamers is not a European counterpart of The Weather Underground. Bertolucci measures the temper of youthful commitment. Isabelle and Theo decorate their bedrooms with movie mementos, most significantly a poster of Godard’s immortal La Chinoise, the telling satire of 60s youth’s political folly. Bertolucci’s perspective is less critical. When Matthew meets Isabelle and Theo’s poet father (Robin Renucci), they have a marvelous dinner table debate over theory vs. observation. It supercedes Theo’s own Oedipal conflict (after challenging his father’s verse, "A poem is a petition/A petition is also a poem"). Bertolucci muses on that epochal split where a philosophical generation faced a generation of romantics.

What distinguished those children of movies and rock ’n’ roll from previous youthful zealots is also what marks them from today’s youth. Bertolucci already explored this difference in the superb Stealing Beauty–a confrontation with the new generation’s puzzlement about itself. Liv Tyler embodied her peers’ unfortunate ignorance of all that came before them even as she naively stepped into the traditions–and foibles–youth automatically inherit. The startling light in Tyler’s eyes as she experienced her first orgasm is the basis of Pitt’s always-startled Matthew, an androgynous boy embodying uncertain sexual and political potential. Pitt is believably drawn to the pansexual allure of movies, and Bertolucci modulates a sensitive and DiCaprio-like performance that rescues Pitt from the blankness of a Larry Clark thug or a Gus Van Sant pin-up.

Like Brando in Last Tango, Pitt is an American version of Bertolucci’s self–all the characters represent an aspect of the director’s experience, the personification of his feelings. Such candor makes Bertolucci the most sexually expressive filmmaker since Sternberg. His sensual and spiritual attributes are also apparent in Green and Garrel’s provocative performances. She’s first seen as a protester chained to the gates of the Cinematheque, then unraveling her bonds like a snake-charmer. Direct, yet mysterious, she evokes French New Wave siren Jeanne Moreau. And Garrel recalls the dark enigma of Victor Mature in The Shanghai Gesture. He completes the Sternberg connection when Isabelle and Matthew dare him to masturbate to a photo of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. All those references make The Dreamers tantalizing. The rhythm of the interpolated film clips suggests a poetic, visionary approach to life.

This movie-drenched movie is a test for all so-called movie-lovers, challenging contemporary devotion to cinema. Matthew describes his menage as a "Freemansory of cinephiles–what all we film buffs are, the insatiables." But perhaps the obsolete term "cinephile" needs to be defined. In this era, love of cinema has been replaced by an attitude of smartness or dumbness. People who are "smart" about movies love the dislocation of Lost in Translation. People who are "dumb" about movies love the triviality of The Lord of the Rings. This twain (which spun off from cinephilia) will never reunite in a new approximation of the 60s and 70s love of cinema because today’s culture no longer requires movies to be an expression of life. That sense of film as a dreamlike evocation of our experiences and concerns is replaced by business savvy and a yearning for escapism.

I fear that The Dreamers will be scoffed at by moviegoers who are perplexed by the characters’–and Bertolucci’s–intense relationship to big-screen examples of beauty, passion and commitment. (Roman Coppola’s genial CQ was a fey American version of the same thing, minus Bertolucci’s erotic force. It found a tiny audience.) A film about people who dream based on a popular art should not be esoteric, or patronizing like last year’s documentary Cinemania. Matthew, Isabelle and Theo are not freaks. When Bertolucci intercuts their flirtations with classic footage of an erotically-sensitized Garbo or Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur running through the Louvre, the point is not name-dropping but to convey how his characters wish their lives were like Queen Christina or Band of Outsiders. (Jacques Demy evoked comparable pathos when his Young Girls of Rochefort struck the same poses as the icons in Meet Me in St. Louis. If moviegoers have lost the ability to feel this connection, we’ve lost a lot.)

Bertolucci’s cinephiles appeal to an almost vanished sympathy. Quentin Tarantino may call his production company Band Apart (after Godard’s Band of Outsiders), but he never makes Bertolucci’s demand that the audience stake a moral claim to the movie past. For Bertolucci, movies are part of a humanizing tradition, thus political. He moves from the shared public moment of May ’68 to a private obsession; then shares that, too. The Dreamers will either be an inspiration for the future or just a loving benediction.