The dreamer

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Movie
German title The dreamer
Original title The Dreamers
Country of production Italy , France , Great Britain
original language English , French
Publishing year 2003
length 115 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Bernardo Bertolucci
script Gilbert Adair
production Jeremy Thomas
music Various
camera Fabio Cianchetti
cut Jacopo Quadri
occupation

The dreamers (original title The Dreamers ) is a feature film from 2003. The work of the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is based on several works by Gilbert Adair , who also wrote the screenplay. Against the background of the riots of 1968 in Paris , he describes the erotic experiences of three young people.

action

The American exchange student Matthew, who still doesn't know anyone in Paris in 1968, meets the twins Isabelle and Théo in front of the Cinémathèque française . When their parents go on vacation, they own the apartment and invite Matthew to move in with them. The cinema-crazy group visits screenings in the Cinémathèque until these are stopped due to student unrest. As the protests intensify, the three hardly leave their apartment. Instead, the trio enjoys being together, reenacting scenes from the film, and gradually an erotic tension also develops between them.

Matthew becomes playful at first, then becomes increasingly involved in what appears to be a long-standing, clandestine erotic relationship between the twins. The test of strength in their games takes its course. When Théo cannot guess a scene in the film, he has to masturbate in front of them as a punishment. Another “punishment” hits Matthew, who has to sleep with Isabelle and afterwards finds out that she was still a virgin. Isabelle and Matthew become a couple, but for the time being this does not detract from the close relationship between Isabelle and Théo. However, a conflict between the three emerges when Matthew tries to get Isabelle to act more independently of her brother. Isabelle is not ready to break away from her brother. Island life reaches its limits when they run out of food. Isabelle sets up a tent in the apartment with blankets, towels and bedding in which they sleep.

When they return home early, the parents discover an apartment full of disorder and empty bottles from their expensive wine store. However, they refrain from waking the young people sleeping naked in the half-open tent, leave them a check and leave. Isabelle is the first to wake up after a while and notices the check. Startled, she searches the apartment for her parents. When she realizes that they have left again, she wants to realize the suicide she had announced to Matthew in the event that her parents notice the sibling love. She connects a hose to the gas pipe in the kitchen and uses it to lie back between the sleeping boys in the tent. When suddenly a stone from a march passing by on the street smashes the window pane and the boys wake up, she rushes back with the hose into the kitchen and interrupts the gas supply. When the boys asked why it smelled so strange, she replied that it was tear gas.

The three young people join the march on the street. This comes to a stop in front of a police blockade, and some violent people begin to throw paving stones. Théo wants to join them and throw a Molotov cocktail against the police blockade. Matthew tries unsuccessfully to dissuade him by reminding him of the pacifist attitudes he has often expressed towards Matthew. However, Théo and Isabelle leave Matthew alone. As Théo throws the Molotov cocktail, the police storm the demonstrators with batons and firearms.

Politics, cinema and sex

The plot is loosely based on Gilbert Adair's novel The Holy Innocents (1988); the author lived in Paris in the late 1960s. Screenwriter Adair made a cameo as a visitor to the Louvre in the film . For his script, he also used motifs from his works Träumer (original title: The Dreamers ) and Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires (both 2003). The background of the story is formed by the events surrounding the dismissal of Henri Langlois , director of the Cinémathèque française , by the Gaullist culture minister André Malraux in February 1968. Many filmmakers, including representatives of the Nouvelle Vague such as Truffaut and Godard , had in the decades after the war got to know film history through the performances of the Cinémathèque. Bertolucci had also attended the screenings at the Cinémathèque on his trips to Paris. However, he spent May 1968 in Rome shooting his feature film Partner . Langlois' removal by the Gaullist government sparked serious protests from film students and well-known film directors. Violent riots broke out. The protests led to the reinstatement of Langlois and the students realized that they could be a social force on the streets. The struggle for the Cinémathèque was the beginning of further unrest, which culminated in the general strike in May .

In the scenes about the protests in front of the Cinémathèque, Jean-Pierre Léaud appears briefly, back-cut with original black and white recordings from back then showing him with other film celebrities. In addition to this documentary material, Bertolucci included numerous quotes from classic films. These include works such as The Cameraman by Buster Keaton , Lights of the Big City by Charles Chaplin , Scarface , Freaks , Blonde Venus with Marlene Dietrich , Queen Christine with Greta Garbo , Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers , Schock-Korridor , Mouchette and the films Out of breath and The Outsider Gang by Jean-Luc Godard . The three youngsters themselves imitate the race through the Louvre from the gang of outsiders and beat the time. The consent of the rights holders to use the desired excerpts from Godard's films was available, but Bertolucci also wanted Godard's personal permission and then praised Godard's generosity. There are also references to film history at the level of the cast: Louis Garrel's father is Philippe Garrel , who made his breakthrough as a film director in 1968, and Eva Green is the daughter of Marlène Jobert , who starred in Godard's Masculin Feminin .

The three young people adore the cinema as if just watching a film were a revolutionary act; for them it is the best of all worlds. The story is told from the American's perspective. American innocence stands alongside European intellectualism. "While reason always has the upper hand with Americans, the French are romantic to the core." The film-dienst complained that the figure Matthew was unhistorical, because of her sense of reality and her rejection of all violence, more of the present. However, the young Americans who were in Paris at the time did not want to go to the Vietnam War and were among those people who opposed violence. The scope for action narrows; The visits of the three outside the home initially concentrate on the Cinémathèque, then they retreat to the apartment, finally to a tent inside the apartment. This reminded many of Bertolucci's The Last Tango in Paris , which was largely played out in the closed room of a Paris city apartment. Bertolucci confirmed the similarity: the dreamers concentrate on the individual who, before the threat of adulthood, crawls into the apartment like a mother's womb, similar to his other film. However, he sees a difference in the depicted sexuality: in the Last Tango it is melancholy and gloomy, in the dreamers it is pleasant and sensual. Only a cobblestone breaks the young people's isolation and makes it clear to them that there is a life out there in which something is going on. Ultimately, Bertolucci portrays himself in the three young people: Like Isabelle, he was crazy about the cinema and tried to stage every detail in his life, like Théo he discussed politics and poetry and sought artistic distance from his father, who was also a poet. Isabelle, the pragmatic Matthew and Théo can even be understood as id, ego and super-ego .

Bertolucci's remarks on the film

For Bertolucci, one reason for making this film was the current lack of knowledge of what really moved the generation of that time. Today only a few people know that it was film enthusiasts who triggered the May riots in Paris. Those involved hoped to change the world and knew that somehow they would be part of that change. "I have not experienced a historic moment that had such splendor, such magic, such enthusiasm!" And: ". The 1960s were for me the best time of my life" He wanted to exaggerate anything, but the audience to encourage how the movement has changed society. The suppression of authoritarian forms of upbringing, the strengthening of democracy and women as well as freer sexuality are achievements that can be credited to the movement. In the opponents of globalization, he sees something like heirs to the 1968 movement.

Focus of criticism

Instead of long debates, Bertolucci conveyed the experience of sexual freedom in wonderful images. A single voice that the film was unrestrained and not an old man's fantasy faced several reviews that stated exactly that, including a "wet dream" in which attractive bodies are exhibited "with epic lust for every setting and subtle voyeurism" . They are nostalgic male fantasies of an aged director looking down on youth and unnecessarily showing Matthew's half erect penis and Isabel's labia; In addition, it is unbelievable that Isabelle should have been a virgin. Bertolucci shows provocations and clichés; although he wanted to praise the achievements of the sexual revolution, he brought genitals and other exposed body parts into the picture as if they were something monstrous. He wanted to show the bourgeois morality his teeth, even if they could no longer bite properly. Occasional approval was given to the actors, who are fresh and appear "extremely natural" . Bertolucci's approach to cinema and his quoting from classic films also received some honorable mention. He does it "as smart as it is passionate," relaxed and never instructive, and the quotes from the whims of the moment are disarming. In an otherwise negative review, they were cited as the film's only glitz.

As Adair's novel was filmed here, the NZZ on Sunday was not happy. Bertolucci has hidden the dark sides of the protagonists, and instead of the torment of their Huis clos, he shows culinary eroticism as an expression of political liberation. The young people at risk in the book have become cosmopolitan hedonists. In contrast, the film service found that the psychological processes inside the apartment and the political outside on the street are elegantly intertwined.

The most discussed point in German-language criticism was how Bertolucci treated the era and the 1968 movement. The Frankfurter Rundschau was happy about a playful, lustful, sometimes clever and sometimes disarmingly naive return to a harmonious relationship between escapist curiosity and politics. The director's sympathy belongs to both dreaming and reason. The political is limited to comprehensible hints “about the strange protective bell that a left bourgeoisie offered the political youth at that time” . The Berliner Zeitung also said that the film contained some nostalgia after 1968 . However, the strip hits the spirit and feeling of the 1968 movement pretty well, whose wearers did not want to grow up and allowed themselves the longest puberty in history. He is also honest because he is not suppressing the Americanism of the movement, as many veterans in Germany are now doing. On the one hand, the review in film-dienst did not classify Bertolucci's attitude as an evocation of his own youth, but rather as an uncomfortable self-questioning, on the other hand, this review states that it is exhilarating how Bertolucci celebrates the way of life at the time. He shows precisely the madness and sadness of the young people; At the same time, this criticism states that he is not denouncing the movement as a misguided nonsense. During that time , Georg Seeßlen stated that Bertolucci was not addressing the question of the political meaning of May '68. “It is not the narcissist Bertolucci who dreams of the sweet time before the revolution, it is the adult artist who asks about the connection between narcissism, cinema and revolt. And not regretted having been right in the middle of the grotesque story of the tragic children. ” He gave Bertolucci credit for refusing to denounce or contrite, depending on his point of view, with which May '68 is often treated in retrospect. "It is as if one wanted to deny the sweetness with the success of the revolt." Bertolucci, on the other hand, moves through the subject with pleasure, easily and personally. The world was of the opinion that Bertolucci cast a blurry, indecisive and contradicting look back, in which it was not clear who or what he was celebrating, criticizing or regretting: dreams or sobriety, the private or the revolt on the street. He had nothing to say and no longer remembered his own dream.

literature

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Conversations with Bertolucci

  • film-dienst No. 2/2004, pp. 10–11: Waking up in the future
  • Focus from January 12, 2004, pp. 54–56: "Politics is pornography"
  • Hamburger Abendblatt from January 23, 2004: What was left of the utopias
  • Welt am Sonntag of January 18, 2004: "Cinema, Politics, Rock 'n' Roll, Sex"

Review mirror

positive

  • Berliner Zeitung , January 21, 2004, p. 17: The longest puberty in history (apt, honest portrait of the 1968 movement)
  • film-dienst No. 2/2004, by Rüdiger Suchsland (self-critical, but not denying look back)
  • Frankfurter Rundschau , January 22, 2004, p. 31, by Daniel Kothenschulte : Before the Revolution (tell the story with relish, relaxed, nostalgic, in wonderful pictures)
  • Stern , January 22, 2004, p. 158, not drawn: The charms of the revolution (small, fine film, convey the anarchic mood)
  • Die Zeit , January 22nd, 2004, by Georg Seeßlen : Sweet Revolution. Archive (joyful affirmation of May '68)

Rather positive

Rather negative

  • Cinema No. 1/2004, in the archive (superficial examination of May '68 as a hook for old man's fantasies and nudity)
  • NZZ am Sonntag , January 11, 2004, p. 48, by Manfred Papst: Consensual misunderstanding (praise for images and actors, but the meaning of the novel is missing)

negative

  • Hamburger Abendblatt , January 22nd, 2004, by Annette Stiekele: Show your teeth to the bourgeoisie (feeble provocations, voyeuristic)
  • taz , January 21, 2004, p. 16, by Birgit Glombitza: On the high seat of the fatherly ( paternal fantasies, think I can still shock with sex)
  • Die Welt , January 21, 2004, by Hanns-Georg Rodek : The revolution ends in the bathtub (thematically undecided, can't bring about a precise memory of May '68)

Other contributions

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Age rating for The Dreamers . Youth Media Commission .
  2. ↑ a b c Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Sunday, January 11, 2004, p. 48, by Manfred Papst: Mutual misunderstanding
  3. ↑ a b Bertolucci in conversation with Focus, January 12, 2004, pp. 54–56
  4. ↑ a b Der Spiegel, No. 4/2004, pp. 148–149, by Urs Jenny
  5. ↑ a b c d Die Welt, January 21, 2004, by Hanns-Georg Rodek : The revolution ends in the bathtub
  6. ↑ a b c d e f g Bertolucci in conversation with film-dienst No. 2/2004, pp. 10–11
  7. ↑ a b c Bertolucci in conversation with Welt am Sonntag, January 18, 2004
  8. ↑ a b c Berliner Zeitung, January 21, 2004, p. 17
  9. ↑ a b c taz, January 21, 2004, p. 16, by Birgit Glombitza: On the high seat of the father
  10. ↑ Michael Adams: The dreamers . In: Magill's Cinema Annual 2005. Thomson Gale, Detroit 2005, ISBN 1-55862-550-X , pp. 121-123
  11. ↑ a b c d e Frankfurter Rundschau, January 22, 2004, p. 31, by Daniel Kothenschulte : Before the Revolution
  12. ↑ a b c d e film-dienst No. 2/2004, by Rüdiger Suchsland
  13. ↑ a b c Seeßlen, Georg: Sweet Revolution. In: Die Zeit, January 22, 2004
  14. ↑ a b Cinema, No. 1/2004
  15. ↑ a b Hamburger Abendblatt, January 22, 2004, by Annette Stiekele: Show the bourgeoisie your teeth
  16. ↑ Berliner Zeitung, January 21, 2004; Frankfurter Rundschau, January 22, 2004; NZZ on Sunday, January 11, 2004