Ray Pride

"I read it in Cahiers du Cinema."

I can tell you the last time a girl said that to me: never. "The first time I went to the Cinematheque Francaise, I thought, only the French," begins the opening narration of Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers." "Only the French would show films in a palace."

At the age of 63, Bertolucci demonstrates that movies are the language of his mind, that each and every sound and gesture of the world gets filed away and massaged into his movies, with the sensual perception that comes at the trailing edge of a long life's knowingness.

Often, his movies are loopy. Silly. Silly about silly people or silly things: much of "Stealing Beauty," for instance. Of the Freud-Marx-father-church mélange that comprises much of his work, themes of twinning and isolation recur for this secret sharer who has been both to confession and to therapy. He's intrigued by the freedom to choose one's prison: "Last Tango," "Last Emperor," "Besieged" and lastly, "The Dreamers." "Besieged" is one of the most sophisticated movies about interior space you could hope to see, a lesson plan in how to place the camera to reveal psychology with minimal dialogue.

"The Dreamers," written by and drawn from a novel by Gilbert Adair ("Love and Death on Long Island") has been lightly controversial for a few moments of nudity that are genteel even in the context of fashion spreads in European movies. "The Dreamers" is about the private raptures of cinephilia: how can a convulsive love of movies inform a young life, how can you live a tactile rhetoric of graze, touch, reveal, conceal? It's 1968. Matthew's an American who falls into the embrace of a creepily close set of twins, Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel). They sense he can break their bond, their lifelong confinement. There is a shot early on when the trio first conspire, the shadows of their figures finger lengthily across the side of a building like the haunting image that marks the stately, elongated passing of an age at the end of Renoir's "The Rules of the Game."

Their parents leave for the country. A vast, dark floor-through becomes their castle. Dreamy in its swelter of specifics, the apartment's swoony involutions are a nautilus-shell-like labyrinth of tome-choked shelving, camera spiraling into the center of the dark, mysterious home, between hoardings of slim-volumed poetry books.

Bertolucci literally quotes with footage from movies they adore. He cross-cuts as they mimic the manufactured lives they've seen on screen, Isabelle does her Garbo intercut with "Queen Christina," their "Bande a part"-like sprint through the Louvre is breathlessly spliced with Godard's original.

But they don't know themselves yet, so they can't fully understand the stories. ("There are no names/for the colours that really matter," the poet Chris Wallace-Crabe wrote.) It's a heady broth for the movie-steeped, in scenes like where the three argue over Keaton versus Chaplin while Jimi plays in the background, and a covetable three-sheet for Godard's "La chinoise" is the decorative chinoiserie behind them.

They all get naked. There's a coda to a masturbation scene in which Isabelle carefully wipes come from a glossy of Marlene Dietrich. They meet each other's dares readily. Fauve colors burst whimsically from within the shadowy patinas: bare skin, breasts, buttocks, pubis, penis as warmly wet as spring's late rains. As our ugly American, Pitt's too pretty. (Too pretty to live, not for the role.) He moves with a feline stalk, a cat lope, all but cantering as the camera inscribes fleet measured curlicues in the worn crepuscular hues of the flat they play within. The trio are intruders in the glaucous, liquorish comfort, a burnished bourgeois womb, suffused with a lived-in warmth found more often in a palm-size snifter. It's like Caravaggio, if his light could ever be considered everyday. (Imagine such a humor and the fact of living within it.)

Pitt's pillowy pretty-boy-ness contrasts with their darker French-English features, he's an idealized version of the watcher in the dark, as if his face had soaked in the reflection of so much submissive beauty playing off the reflective screen up ahead. Bertolucci's camera loves Pitt, drawing a boy as ungainly and downy and unaware of his motions as a foal unfolding. He also loves Green's Isabelle, her large breasts and wide nipples, but also close-ups soaking up her wide blue eyes and her forest floor of reckless freckles across her broad cheekbones. Bertolucci's camera also tracks along her nude body to her bared labia as if stalking the final framing, that of the painter Courbet's notoriously carnal close-up, "The Origin of the World."

The story doesn't add up to much until the air rushes into the place at movie's end, as the streets go to riot. Still, there's a hothouse authenticity that allows small, shivery frissons to bloom. Bertolucci's OCD-like attention to every detail includes a welter of shots that include clocks, indicating a specific time, and always one that makes sense to the scene at hand. Green's hair is caught aflame in one instant, the image, in one of two notable moments in "The Dreamers," is slowed and a sudden wisp of sizzle sounds. Pitt swats it instinctively, lightly, the shot returns to its twenty-four-frame-per-second nature. It is a moment worth so many more entire movies; the other is the stunning final shot, robotic hordes of riot cops jumping over protestors, barricades, the camera, going over our heads as flames feebly persist on the macadam and Edith Piaf sings, "Je regrette rien."

I regret nothing. On the cobbles, youth's tepid flames gutter ineffectually.

"The Dreamers" opens Friday.

(2004-02-11)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Kevin Macdonald's movie is based on Joe Simpson's book about his experiences in 1985 when he and Simon Yates foolishly braved the only mountain in the Peruvian range that hadn't been scaled
(2004-02-03)

Up from the underground
After the Oscar nominations are announced, Bill Siegel says he can't do "Chicago Tonight" that evening: he's at O'Hare, breathlessly on his way to New York City to join his "The Weather Underground" documentary co-director Sam Green
(2004-02-03)

Puck'd
A compact epic about an inarticulate dreamer, Gavin O'Connor's "Miracle" is a sweet surprise
(2004-02-03)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2004-02-03)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-28)

Indie Jones
(2004-01-28)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-20)

Full of grace
(2004-01-20)

Death becomes him
(2004-01-20)

Short Runs
(2004-01-20)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-13)

Short Runs
(2004-01-13)

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