Films, Dreams and Real Life

By Steven Rosen, Special to The LA Times


What if a movie could dream?

Bernardo Bertolucci believes he has answered that surrealist question
in his latest movie, "The Dreamers," which opens Friday. It is about
three film-loving students ó a naive American young man and a
disconcertingly intimate French brother and sister ó who meet outside
Paris' Cinematheque FranÁaise during violent 1968 demonstrations
protesting the dismissal of its director, Henri Langlois. Their
relationship becomes a rule-breaking one as tumultuous as the
politically rebellious times, and Bertolucci depicts it with enough
graphic sexuality to earn the film an NC-17 rating.

But "The Dreamers" also operates on another level. It is a
remembrance of films past as well as of times past. Bertolucci
intertwines his narrative with scenes from a dozen or so old movies.
These vintage clips serve to comment on his story, explain his
characters' motivations, or simply as a kind of free-association
reverie.

"Let's imagine a film has its own identity beyond the characters, the
story, the plot," Bertolucci says in a phone interview from London.
"The clips in 'The Dreamers' are like the dreams of the film. It is
like the film was dreaming."

The movie's first use of such a clip is a shock ó quite literally.
The American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) goes to the Cinematheque
to watch Samuel Fuller's 1963 thriller "Shock Corridor" ó about a
journalist trapped in a mental institution. He watches raptly, as do
others in the audience, including Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin
brother Theo (Louis Garrel).

"I wanted to start with an American film because it is being seen by
Matthew," Bertolucci explains. "And I wanted one of those American
films that probably was not so well-considered in the States but was
discovered in France by Cahiers du Cinema and Positif and those
[film] magazines. It was a way to say something about the character
of Matthew. France used to be the strongest place for such passion
for film."

"The Dreamers' " characters watch another old film at the
Cinematheque when, on a date, Matthew takes Isabelle to a screening
of Frank Tashlin's 1956 rock musical "The Girl Can't Help It."

Bertolucci, working with editor Jacopo Quadri, also inserts clips
into the narrative. His characters like to act out movie scenes as if
involved in a game of charades. And Bertolucci provides his audience
with the answers, as when cutting between Isabelle prancing about her
apartment with a feather duster and "Blonde Venus' " Marlene Dietrich
dancing about in an ape costume. Another time, she enchants Matthew
by touching objects in a bedroom of her parents' apartment as he
awakes ó as Greta Garbo does for John Gilbert in "Queen Christina."

"In the future, in my memory, I shall spend a great deal of time in
this room," Garbo intones in the clip Bertolucci uses. The clips also
can serve as a direct address from Bertolucci to us ó as when he
shows bits of Buster Keaton's "The Cameraman" and Charlie Chaplin's
"City Lights" while Matthew and Theo argue over which silent-film
auteur was better.

"I personally had this discussion about Keaton or Chaplin many
times," Bertolucci recalls. "At the beginning I was for Keaton
against Chaplin, then I switched over the years and now it's
impossible to choose between the two. But there was a kind of
hormonal strength when I was young in being very fundamentalist,
being completely, totally for one and against the other."

While some clips used in "The Dreamers" were called for in the
screenplay by Gilbert Adair, whose novel "The Holy Innocents" is the
basis for the movie, several were Bertolucci's idea. For instance, he
decided to insert a scene from Robert Bresson's wrenching 1967
"Mouchette" because he realized it matched a suicidal impulse of
Isabelle's.

And he thought to create a veritable call-and-response between
Isabelle and "Breathless' " Jean Seberg, both shouting out "New York
Herald Tribune." (Seberg sells the newspaper in Paris in Jean-Luc
Godard's jump-cutting, 1959 New Wave classic.) "Breathless" has
particular resonance for Bertolucci, the 63-year-old Italian-born
director of the Oscar-winning "The Last Emperor."

"I saw 'Breathless' in a [Paris] movie theater. It was a kind of
enlightenment," he says. "I was writing poems ó my father was a poet
very much loved in Italy. It was when I started to think I wouldn't
be able to be as good as him, and that I needed to find my own way.
Two movies changed my life: 'Breathless' and 'La Dolce Vita.' " The
latter, released in 1960, "was extraordinary," he says. "It was when
I thought, 'I would love to do that.' "

Bertolucci also uses Godard's 1964 "Band of Outsiders" to create a
parallel construction, a mirroring of shots, as the youths of that
film race through the Louvre while Matthew, Isabelle and Theo reenact
the scene.

"I wrote him before shooting, saying, 'Dear Jean-Luc, we haven't seen
each other for a long time but I would like to use a few seconds of
"Breathless" and ["Band of Outsiders"] and already have permission
from the owners of the rights, but would still like your
permission,'" Bertolucci explains. "He wrote me back saying, 'You can
take what you want and remember: There are no author rights, only
duties.' "

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