But I was all of those things, and the movie brings back none of my experience. “It only seemed that way, for a time.” But to whom did it seem that way?īertolucci’s movie is supposed to show us how great it was in 1968 to be young and horny and in Paris and political and smitten with movies seen at the Cinémathèque. “It is clear now that Godard and sexual liberation were never going to change the world,” he writes. Ebert apparently assumes that “we” once thought we could change the world, and “we” were wrong. Adair, who’d moved to Paris in ’68, was another and became a good friend.Īll this might make me too personally invested in the material to view The Dreamers as a movie with some historical value. But I remained in Paris for the rest of the summer, moved into a flat in the neighborhood the following fall, and wound up a Cinémathèque regular. I found myself fleeing a police charge one day and getting a potent whiff of tear gas on another. I checked into a hotel there in mid-June, just after the police had taken back the nearby Odeon Theatre from the student rebels and cleared away the makeshift street barricades, though parts of trees that had been chopped down for the barricades still lay along Boulevard Saint-Michel, and the city still felt strangely energized. In his unabashedly nostalgic four-star review of the film Roger Ebert, who’s only slightly older than I am, recalls being a tourist in the Left Bank in May ’68 and getting hit with rubber truncheons during a police charge. Among the more striking deletions are sex between Matthew and Theo, a visit the threesome makes to a castle in Normandy, and Matthew’s death in a street demonstration. Among the additions to the original story are the heroine’s loss of virginity, belying her apparent sophistication, and Matthew’s efforts to separate her from Theo and take her out on a “normal” date - both of which smack of the Freudian revisionism that has been part of Bertolucci’s thinking for some time. (The two are an interesting match: Bertolucci’s cinema tends to be a heterosexual project that flirts with homosexuality, and Adair’s fiction tends to be a homosexual project that flirts with heterosexuality.) Adair has hinted that a revision is coming, and the film contains substantial changes in the plot, though some of them are probably as much Bertolucci’s as Adair’s. Despite (or perhaps because of) its autobiographical elements, Adair has long been dissatisfied with the book and systematically refused to consider a movie version until Bertolucci came along. The Holy Innocents was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and is interesting mainly for the wit and invention of the prose - even the incest has a highly literary pedigree. Love and Death on Long Island (1990) to Thomas Mann and The Key of the Tower (1998) to Alfred Hitchcock. Barrie disguised as sequels, and many of his later novels are multifaceted hommages - e.g. (The main literary device in the movie, Matthew’s offscreen narration, doesn’t exist in the book.) Adair’s earlier Alice Through the Needle’s Eye (1984) and Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987) are highly adroit pastiches of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Gilbert Adair wrote the script, adapting his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents: A Romance, which is, unlike the movie, extremely literary. Street demonstrations led to clashes with the police - and turned out to be dress rehearsals for the student demonstrations and workers’ strikes that May, which came dangerously close to shutting the country down. Their interactions run parallel to the French government’s firing of the disorderly director of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, and the ensuing outcry among cinephiles and filmmakers. Invited into the siblings’ flat just before their parents leave on vacation, he gets drawn into their perverse and vaguely incestuous games, which combine charades involving movies, sex, and ultimately politics. Those who wax nostalgic about the radicalism of their youth usually imply that the values that made it so attractive back then also make it impossible to hold on to today.īernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, set in Paris over three months in early 1968, focuses on an American student, Matthew (Michael Pitt), who becomes intimately involved with a French brother and sister, Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), whom he meets at the Cinémathèque. Nostalgia is highly selective, abridging the past and adjusting it to fit the terms of the present - and often becoming an ideological con job in the process. With Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Robin Renucci, and Anna Chancellor. From the Chicago Reader (February 20, 2004).
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