The great Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci shares this with his American colleague Robert Altman -- the films panned heaviest by critics are often amongst their best.
With Altman, this was true of his caustic comic commentary on the fashion industry, Pret a Porter. With Bertolucci, it was true of his provoking study of alienation, The Sheltering Sky.
So when I read some fairly scathing overseas reviews of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, I was prepared not to be disappointed.
Nor was I. For though some critics saw The Dreamers as an old man's soft-core pornographic dream, it is in fact a very thoughtful exploration of sexual mores and politics, set in the late 1960s, when both those aspects of life were glued together by the hottest adhesive yet invented -- rock music.
The tale is set in Paris, 1968 -- a very special year for that often-tumultous city. It was the year of the student riots, centred around the Sorbonne University -- riots which crystallised the generational gap, and triggered by the shock dismissal of the Director of the Paris Cinemateque, the breeding ground of New-Wave cinema.
Those were heady days, full of revolution. The student anthem, played on every street-corner jukebox, was the B-side of the Beatles' hit 45, 'Hey Jude' ... the B-side being 'Revolution'. My girlfriend and I visited Paris that very year -- the tension and excitement was palpable.
Bertolucci uses an outsider to frame his tale around -- an American student studying in Paris, who is also a cinephile (as we all were, and still are) -- Matthew, played by Michael Pitt.
He gets caught up in the famous Cinemateque demonstration, and there meets the young French girl Isabelle (Eva Green) and through her, her brother Theo (Louis Garrell). They are twins. And they share Matthew's love of cinema.
They invite Matthew home. And their mother, finding Matthew lives alone, invites him to stay the night. The parents leave for a month -- and Matthew stays on. And on. And on.
Matthew discovers that the twins often sleep together. And they think nothing of nakedness -- it's the way they were born together, and the way they live together still. There are strong hints here that they could be incestuous. But in fact are they? Bertolucci plays this lose to his chest for quite a while.
The three enfants terrible continually play games -- games usually based on cinema, and with pretty strong sexual content. And Bertolucci is not himself above playing cinematic games --watch for the strong visual reference to a key movie of that era, Jean-Luc Godard's 'The Outsiders' -- though the way he films this evokes Francois Truffaut just as much as Luc Godard!
Finally, Matthew becomes Isabelle's lover -- while there are hints that he might be fairly close to Theo as well.
It all seems like a sort of sexual lotus-land. But Bertolucci shows in fact that he regards the twins as childish spoilt brats. Amidst the political and social turmoil of Paris, it is the outsider, Matthew, who realises that he is not a child; he is a young adult and must leave childish things behind. But can the twins follow Matthew in his journey? Bertolucci's answer is emphatic and totally realistic.
This is one of Bertolucci's strongest movies. No, it doesn't reach the heights of his masterpiece The Conformist (few movies could), but it is thoughtful and provoking. And, despite the 'R' rating, it is never exploitative or ever approaching pornography. But yes, if you're offended by nudity, be prepared to be offended very very often.....
