The Dreamers: A Surprise Package

Stylish, erotic, forgivable pretentious drama with lashings of explicit sex and strong performances from its three leads.

The Dreamers is adapted for the screen by Gilbert Adair, based on his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents. It’s also directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, which seems oddly appropriate, given that the same director made the equally controversial Last Tango In Paris – indeed, you could practically nick-name The Dreamers ‘First Tango In Paris’.

At any rate, though it won’t be to everyone’s tastes, The Dreamers is an erotic, frequently pretentious but no less enjoyable drama that’s a treat for fans of classic cinema.

Pretentious Sex play

Michael Pitt (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) stars as Matthew, an American student and obsessive film fan, studying in Paris in 1968. Spending most of his time at the famous Cinematheque, Matthew quickly befriends two fellow students: sultry, beautiful Isabelle (Eva Green) and her non-identical twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel).

When their parents go on holiday, Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay at their apartment, where they play a series of increasingly messed up mind games, experimenting with both their sexuality and their emotions – their favourite game involves spotting film references, with sexual forfeits involved for the loser.

The film is undoubtedly pretentious, but this is entirely justified by the characters themselves - the games they play are about play-acting, their conversations and actions deliberately stylised to reflect and emulate the films they constantly watch. Bertolucci makes excellent use of old film clips and part of the fun of the film (at least for Rabid Film Obsessives) is in ‘playing along’ with the characters, though joining in with the forfeits is probably ill-advised.

The editing is superb, too – particularly the scene where they run through the Louvre, which is cut together with the characters from La Bande Aparte doing the same thing.

Intense Performances

As for the performances, Pitt does well in his biggest role to date, but it’s Eva Green who really impresses – she’s hypnotically beautiful, though at the same time you can occasionally glimpse the messed-up vulnerability in her face. Louis Garrel is also good – his chemistry with Green is disturbingly intense and the film is cleverly structured so that you spend a large part of it wondering exactly who is controlling who. (It’s also very odd to see Anna Chancellor playing their mother!).

There are several great scenes, as well as several instances of censor-baiting that are bound to prove controversial – particularly amusing is an extended masturbation sequence in front of a picture of Marlene Dietrich, as well as a bizarre scene where Matthew and Isabelle have graphic sex on the kitchen floor while Theo nonchalantly fries a few eggs. (Frankly, this is the best film to see for Shallow And Obvious Reasons since Swimming Pool).

In short, The Dreamers is a stylish, intensely erotic drama with good performances - it won’t appeal to everyone, but film fanatics should get a big kick out of it.

Life is Beautiful: A Review

Laughing in the face of adversity is the best way to triumph over it. This is a sentiment I share with Roberto Benigni, director of Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) the only movie to ever make me laugh out loud and leave me with sad tears in my eyes.

The film has two parts to it. In the first part Benigni, who also co-wrote the script with Vincenzo Cerami, plays Guido, a waiter working for his uncle who owns a hotel in Italy. He keeps bumping (literally) into his principessa Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). By staging an elaborate (and humourous!) series of events which make it appear as if the Virgin Mary herself is cooperating with him, Guido rescues Dora from marrying the stodgy town clerk. Life appears to be going fairly well for Guido even though Mussolini has just signed a pact with Hitler to implement his Nazi policies with regards to Jews. Flash forward five years later and we see Guido owning a bookstore he manages with his wife and son Giosué. It's almost the end of World War II, but that makes the position of Jewish-Italians all the more precipitous. One day, the Germans come to take away Guido and his son. His wife, not being Jewish, chooses to go along.

Right from the start, Guido takes a huge risk by treating the whole exercise as a joke. He explains to his son that they've just bought tickets to take part in a contest to win a tank (not a toy one, but a real one, thought of which lights up Giosué's eyes) and proceeds to concoct an imaginative and humourous explanation for the happenings around, and to, them in the German concentration camp.

All of the things Guido asks Giosué to do are in the interest of saving Giosué. However, given Guido's personality depicted in the first half of the film, I don't think he could've acted differently even if wanted to. While the first part of the movie illustrates Benigni's talents as a slapstick comedian, some of the best humour is in the German camp. Here, Guido is not only funny to his son (and the audience) but he must also eke out humour in situations where people's lives are stake. We see Guido making a joke out of a German officer's instructions to the prisoners---a situation where a misunderstanding on the part of the prisoner could lead to their deaths.

Some may find this comparison sacrilegious, but Benigni reminds me of Jim Carrey in many respects. From his "performance" at the Oscars (climbing on chairs and rivalling Whoopi Goldberg in his one-liners), I assume Benigni very much lives his life the way he portrays Guido in Life is Beautiful, always cheerful, goofy, and smiling at and in the face of misfortune. Benigni's acting is terrific and believable. (As I write this, it's well-known that Life is Beautiful won the Oscar not only for Best Foreign Film, but Nicola Piovani won an Oscar for the Best Original Dramatic Score and Benigni won the Best Actor award.) The chemistry between Benigni and Braschi, who happens to Benigni's real-life wife, is excellent. The cinematography, the direction, and the pacing are all superb, except for the odd scene where Guido gets lost in the prison camp (which isn't that big) and stumbles across a pile of decaying corpses that have been through the gas showers. It is a jarring scene that simply does not fit in with the rest of the film.

The movie has been criticised as an exercise in holocaust revisionism. In my view, the fantasy Benigni creates (and it is a fantasy) is done primarily to enable us to laugh at one of the most terrible atrocities to occur in human history.

It's debatable how much children (or anyone) should be shielded from real-life horrors (I'm of the belief that it's generally better to know sooner than later), but in this fable, Guido's gamble (with a high risk) pays off. The emotional ending which made me cry is all the more powerful because up till the end, we do not know what is really going to happen. And given that most of the films I see comes out of Hollywood, I was shaking my head in disbelief long after the movie ended. This is the kind of a movie I've waited for a long time to be made and in my view deserved the Oscars for all the categories it was nominated for but didn't win. In so much as comparisons can be made, Life is Beautiful is a better picture than Shakespeare in Love and Benigni does a better job of direction than Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.