Page 10, 20th February 2004

20th February 2004

Page 10

Page 10, 20th February 2004 — Bertolucci: the case for the defence
Close

Report an error

Noticed an error on this page?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it.

Tags

Locations: Paris

Share


Related articles

Joan: No Saint But So Much A Sinner?

Page 10 from 11th December 1981

A Multi-coloured Bore

Page 2 from 9th August 1963

Long Slice Of History In A Family Setting

Page 8 from 24th March 1978

Triumphal Season's C

Page 6 from 5th September 1980

Lions Eating Christians

Page 4 from 10th September 1993

Italy Bans Arthouse Film

Page 2 from 6th March 1998

Bertolucci: the case for the defence

Cinema
The Dreamers
18 CERT, 130 MINS
On Newsnight Review a couple of weeks ago, Bonnie Greer complained about the reference to Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina in Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, The Dreamers. The latter follows the developing relationship between French unjoined, conjoined brother-sister twins and an American in Paris from the early spring of 1968 to the famous événements of May of that year. They meet at a demonstration against the dismissal of the director of the Cinémathèque Française, a real-life event that in its success – Henri Langlois was eventually reinstated – arguably fuelled the hopes of other protestors that they too might effect a change in the despised status quo. Keen cineastes, Theo, Isabelle and Matthew form a friendship initially based upon a desire to recreate Godard’s ménage-à-trois Bande À Part. Like all good Godardians, life for them is a badly made film. And so, among many other reconstructions of famous film scenes, we find Eva Green’s Isabelle reenacting that in which the great Garbo touches the walls, the windows, the furnishings of the happy chamber which she must give up to return to her regal duties. For Greer, that a girl so unqueenly should utter Christina’s immortal, “I’ve been memorising this room. In the future in my memory I shall spend much time in this room” was akin to blasphemy.
Yet it’s a quotation that holds the key both to understanding the film and the many violent attacks which have been made upon it. Coming from a younger team, The Dreamers would surely have been universally applauded as one of the most entertaining and invigorating European cinematic interrogations of the difference between art and life, fantasy and reality, past memories and present actualities. But there are many critics for whom May 1968 represents a golden age, a room remembered in which they spend much time. That the film doesn’t conform to
their memories would be affront enough, but that it features a screenplay adapted from his novel by Gilbert Adair – a man who left his job as Independent on Sunday film critic because he claimed that watching American fare was making him physically ill – and is directed by the Italian auteur who gave us masterpieces like The Conformist and The Spider’s Strategm; that The Dreamers comes courtesy of two such venerated veterans of the time and yet still refuses to confirm critics’ rose-tinted remembrances represents the ultimate betrayal. “It wasn’t like that,” comes the complaint, unfairly condemning the film not for what it is but for what it isn’t: “The man who gave us Last Tango in Paris offers us now this unjoined, conjoined twin – I can’t believe it’s not better!”
Like its notorious predecessor, the film has been criticised for its explicit sex scenes. And it is extremely explicit; perhaps unnecessarily so: while the homoerotic and incestuous undertones are arguably necessary in this tale of young adults so afraid to grow up and confront the outside world that they disappear narcissistically into themselves, Bertolucci certainly allows his camera to glance too frequently and linger too lovingly on the genitalia of his nascent stars.
It has also been dismissed as superficial and pretentious, and this is unfair. These are adjectives which could justly be directed at the three heroes: for them the cinema of the past offers a room into which they can escape, rather than face the terrifying present; they would rather pretend to be movie-stars projected large in two-dimensions than exist as small, flesh-and-blood adults. But to dismiss the film as such is to ignore the title, ignore the dialogue, ignore the apartment as labyrinthine as human motivation – mirrored and claustrophobically smothering as the threesome – in which most of the action takes place, ignore all the shadows and silhouettes of the camerawork.
By forsaking a ponderous exploration of 1968’s battles of the barricades for a light examination of the battles of three emergent selves, Bertolucci has made his finest film in 20 years.
Cliive Johnson




blog comments powered by Disqus