The Dreamers is a French-British-Italian film first released in 2003, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  The film stars Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Anna Chancellor and Robin Renucci.  It has also been released under the title: Paris ’68.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Write a synopsis for this film...

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) is one of his most intellectually challenging films, more so than The Conformist (1970), and even more semantically intricate than his The Spider’s Stratagem (1970).  It is a film about the pernicious influence of repression of the infantile sexual urge (incestuous desire) on a person’s psychological development.

The Dreamers depicts a pair of incestuous twins (a brother and sister named Isabelle and Theo) in their early twenties, who are tormented by their barren sexual fixation on each other.  If they could give themselves to their desire they would pass through it into sexual adulthood.  (The incestuous need makes sex more important than it really is, just because it is forbidden.)   The problem is that the beautiful French twins are psychologically repressed and therefore stay forever fixated on their infantile sexual obsession.  Instinctively, they both need a sexual ersatz-object which unexpectedly comes along in the form of their new American friend (Matthew).  Unfortunately, the latter has his own psychological complex which makes it possible for him to agree to become sexually involved with Isabelle, in spite of not being loved by her and despite the fact that he himself was just attracted to her beauty and sexiness (without amorous complications).   According to Bertolucci’s images, this situation is quite widespread in Western civilization, and this allows the director to make some daring generalizations about why young people are not able to promote social change towards a more democratic life, despite the alleged openness of democratic societies to humanistic progress.

The fixation on an infantile sexual object by those who (like Isabelle and Theo) are traumatized by their unconscious or conscious incestuous desires, and the proclivity of those who (like Matthew) are ready to mate with an attractive being without a simultaneous amorous need - these represent the two halves of Western youth, in which sexual life is a symptom of emotional and psychological underdevelopment.   One group needs a incestuous ersatz-object and leads a pseudo-conventional sexual life.  Both groups need to be passionately occupied with artefacts (consumer goods, hobby or technical toys) to which they are emotionally tied symbiotically, in an infantile manner  inside today’s omnipresent mass-cultural setting.

This is why the drama of our "dreamers" takes place amidst the student rebellion of Paris in May 1968, and why all three protagonists are hooked on cinema like a child on its toy.  They use cinema as an alternative to living; they exist inside the films they watch; their love for cinema has a symbiotic immediacy that is characteristic of the consumerist tie between the subject and the things he/she possesses, or the images and ideas he/she bonds with.   The repressed incestuous object (Theo) in Isabelle’s life is reincarnated as an incestuous ersatz-object (Matthew) and as incestuous artefacts (cinema for all three main characters).  The film includes several sex scenes and much multifaceted (and multi-angled) nudity, but everything in it is colored by Bertolucci’s sadness about the lost existential direction of our civilization.  Does he love young people?  He is worried about the way in which their general sensibility has become distorted by psychological repression and ideological and the predatory consumerism of today’s society.

Please, visit:  www.actingoutpolitics.com  to read my full essay about The Dreamers and other Bertolucci films (with analysis of stills), and also articles on films by several other directors including Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Bresson, Ken Russell, Wim Wenders and Maurice Pialat.

© Victor Enyutin (Seattle, US) 2011

Write a review for this film...


What do you think of this film?

More British Drama
More Italian Drama
Recent DVD releases