“Is sex dirty?” begins the old joke, to which the answer is: “Only if you’re doing it right.” They’re pretty much doing it right in this very arch, very sexy and unashamedly nostalgic love-letter to the Paris of 1968 and the movies consumed at its legendary Cinémathèque Française.
To be fully enjoyed, this movie’s affectations have to be indulged, but they are allowances for which you will be repaid with a delectable film. Director Bernardo Bertolucci has simply given us his best picture for many years, working from an elegant, urbane screenplay by Gilbert Adair, an adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel The Holy Innocents.
Thirty-two years ago, Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris showed obsessive sex in claustrophobic, enclosed spaces, and this is a distant cousin to that fantasy, though coloured with innocence and naive idealism.
Michael Pitt plays Matthew, a 20-year-old provincial from San Diego who arrives in late-60s Paris full of callow admiration for the spirit of the times and, among a crowd of protesters, finds the only two people as unfeasibly pulchritudinous as he is. The absurdly beautiful Louis Garrel plays Theo, and the slightly less beautiful but Olympic-level sexy Eva Green is Theo’s sister Isabelle; matching scars on their arms show that they were conjoined twins, separated at birth. Theo and Isabelle are students, madly over-excited by les événements, but even more excited by all the movies they’ve been watching.
Almost immediately, they take Matthew under their wing, insisting he moves into the ramshackle apartment owned by their rumpled poet father and English mother (Anna Chancellor) who depart for the country leaving behind them an unwholesome babes-in-the-wood situation. Very, very quickly it becomes clear that Theo and Isabelle’s relationship is humidly close; they sleep together naked and live out their waking lives in a semi-autistic private game composed of sexual experimentation and, of course, movies.
Matthew is invited to join this quasi-incestuous ménage - which is cheerfully explicit, and speckled with references to Cocteau, Godard, Truffaut, Tod Browning, and many, many more. The way Garrel and Green artlessly project the look of a young Belmondo and Moreau is a cinematic quotation in itself.
As soon as Matthew is left alone with Theo and Isabelle, he finds himself out of his depth, constantly being invited into the bathroom and bedroom and challenged not to mind or notice their flagrant déshabille. One of their many games of movie charades ends with Theo flunking a question, and his forfeit is to masturbate with his favourite photograph of Marlene Dietrich as a visual aid, in front of the other two. In revenge, Theo contrives a forfeit for his sister: she must have sex with Matthew, while he watches.
Soon a passionate three-way romance is underway, with lashings of homoeroticism and incestuous fervour. It’s as if, through some karmic economy, all the sex that the characters in Withnail and I were failing to get is displaced into this movie.
Naturally, no self-respecting sophisticate admits to being affected by sex scenes, but I will only say that the full-throttle, full-frontal moments in The Dreamers seemed to enforce a cathedral hush in the London screening I attended - though at the Venice film festival the response was a light and ubiquitous chuckling - and one sequence in particular was punctuated by the sound of someone’s notebook distantly clattering from lap to floor.
So much for the bonking. What about those classic films? The way these are quoted, and overtly referenced in terms of actual clips - flatteringly identifiable, in the main - might try the patience of many, and Michael Pitt’s overly precious voiceover at the very beginning, intoning his memories of the first film he ever saw at the Cinémathèque, is an unfortunate moment to start with. But this mannerism underlines the hapless, hopeless fan-devotion of Theo and Isabelle in a lost pre-video, pre-DVD culture when movies did not exist outside the temple of the cinema.
Their political arguments are pretty cringe-inducing, though they are plausibly cringe-inducing in the way they would have been at the time, with Theo fatuously claiming that all his fan-worship constitutes “our very own cultural revolution”, and Mao is like a movie director making an epic.
Like many period movies, The Dreamers cheats a little in retrospect: Matthew airily remarks that US soldiers in Vietnam are listening to Jimi Hendrix - was that association common currency in 1968? But much of the 1960s furniture, in its tattiness, looks pretty real: particularly the robust European bathroom facilities and the gruesome business of getting caught short and having to pee in the sink. Only the forced ending, in which Matthew angrily disagrees with Theo and Isabelle over political violence - his wholesome American good sense at odds, finally, with their incipient monomania and fanaticism - strikes a false note.
But The Dreamers looks and feels great. The three central performances have the unselfconscious languor and intensity of extreme youth and the Paris conjured by Bertolucci and his production designer Jean Rabasse is not disgraced by its classic-celluloid samplings. Watching this film is like drinking a bottle of good red wine, all at once, on an empty stomach. Not good for you, but wickedly pleasurable all the same.