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Impossible dream
But the difference between Tango and The Dreamers is like night and day. The former was a breakthrough, and featured Marlon Brando in one of the greatest male performances ever put on film. The Dreamers is like Young Guns compared to The Wild Bunch. At worst, it’s sort of an NC-17 version of Rugrats in Paris. When the mighty fall, they do so with a thud. And so with Bertolucci, who only 16 years ago held court in the first ranks of directors with his Oscar-winning The Last Emperor. Since then, Bertolucci has squandered his time and talent on a variety of lesser projects, from Little Buddha to Stealing Beauty. Only in his dreams does The Dreamers represent his comeback. From a novel (The Holy Innocents) by Gilbert Adair, this film is a nostalgic look back to the turbulent days of Paris in 1968. It was the year in which France came a hair’s breadth away from a leftist revolution. Students were marching in the streets. Union strikes had crippled the country. In the midst of the chaos was a protest involving the head of the Cinematheque Francaise, the city’s famed film archive and museum. Bertolucci and Adair personalize the events of the day by situating their hero in the protest. In the 1950s, the Cinematheque was where such future French New Wave directors as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut religiously immersed themselves in movies. When its director, Henri Langlois, was removed in 1968, the situation set off a firestorm. Matthew (Michael Pitt) is an American film buff in Paris, come to worship at the Cinematheque altar. A lanky, baby-faced blonde, Pitt is trying to cut it as a cut-rate Leonardo DiCaprio. Faster than you can say "cinephilia," Matthew meets Isabelle (Eva Green), a chic young Parisian in a red beret. Isabelle and her twin brother, Theo (Louis Garrel), invite Matthew to stay with them at their family’s sprawling Paris flat. At its heart, Dreamers is Bertolucci’s valentine to the movies that nurtured him in his youth. It’s full of homages to the New Wave, epecially Godard, his one-time mentor. Matthew, Isabelle and Theo breathlessly race through the Louvre, just as Anna Karina did in 1964’s Bande a Part. The music echoes the romantic scores that Michel Legrand wrote for those wistful Godard films. Bertolucci’s plot itself hearkens back to Les Enfants Terrible, a Jean Cocteau play that Jean-Pierre Melville turned into a film in 1950. Its main characters are a semi-incestuous brother and sister who spend their days playing devious mind games in their Paris apartment. Outside of film nostalgia, Bertolucci’s aims are as hazy as tear gas. While the battle for Paris rages outside, these three are oblivious, content to play movie trivia and indulge in kinky games. The losers are forced to perform sex acts while the winner watches. Last Tango was about sexual need and desperation. More to the point, it was about adults. There’s little of that in the wet Dreamers, only mundane dialogue coming out of the mouth of babes. Pitt’s droning narration made me want to jump into the Seine. Given Bertolucci’s longtime leftist persuasions, the politics of the film are surprising. In this revisionism, it’s the American who’s pictured as the mature rationalist. Isabelle and Theo, as symbols of the student left, come off as childish and decadent. All this from a director who made 1900, one of the few Marxist movies ever to make it to the commercial mainstream. Many of Bertolucci’s films have been encounters between Marx and Freud. This one stays the course. In the courageous Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci implicitly asked, "What comes after the sexual revolution?" The answer on many lips in the 1960s was political revolution. Three decades later, we’re left with only the former, not the latter. Instead of an egalitarian society, we’ve learned to be content with Tantric sex and the Playboy Channel. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Forget-me-knot
This is our yearly dose of Adam Sandler, a comic with an uncanny knack for crass, money-making humor. Sandler is clever enough to realize that enticing female co-stars help take the edge off his grating personality. That’s where Drew Barrymore comes in, both in his hit The Wedding Singer and now 50 First Dates. Sandler plays serial dater Henry Roth, a Hawaii veterinarian who never goes out with the same woman twice. That all changes when he meets Lucy (Barrymore) one morning at a beachfront cafe. Henry is smitten, especially when he sees her making a tepee out of her waffles. Not only do men and woman have to meet cute in the movies these days, but they have to get together through some forgettable gimmick. Lucy, we’re told, suffers from short-term memory loss, the result of a run-in with a stray–but non-mad–cow. Each night, Lucy forgets everything that happened to her during the day. For the guys, George Wing’s script may distill the mysterious miseries of the dating game. Every morning, Henry has to dream up a different line to get Lucy’s attention. In a sane world, the same line should work on her every day. But Lucy’s a fickle one, which puts Henry in his daily pickle. Barrymore has gotten miles out of that cute crooked smile, and it shines again with all the appeal of a Hawaiian sunrise. Barrymore is such a charmer in these sorts of roles, she’d make even a blind date open his eyes. 50 First Dates is fitfully funny and touching, but don’t forget it’s firstly an Adam Sandler film. That means Sandler and director Peter Segal just can’t resist piling on with almost as many crude jokes as there are dates. Penises–both human and walrus–are at the butt of most of these gags. A sprinkling of laughs come from Sandler’s oddball support, including a one-eyed islander (Rob Schneider) and an oversexed androgyne (Lusia Strus) who looks like a Valkyrie weightlifter. In the middle of the fray is Barrymore’s Lucy, facing a conundrum of existential identity that would confound Jean-Paul Sartre. But Lucy’s medical condition becomes clearer if you ponder her dilemma. If I had to see Adam Sandler each morning, I’d probably want to forget about it, too. Thomas Delapa reviews the latest movies on KUVO (FM 89.3) Friday mornings. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Thirty years ago, director Bernardo Bertolucci shocked audiences–and changed film history–with his sexually explicit Last Tango in Paris. The Italian director has returned to the scene of the crime in The Dreamers, another no-holds-barred bedroom study of erotic abandon.
What would happen if Groundhog Day went to Hawaii with Memento? In the recycling movie machine that is Hollywood, the answer is 50 First Dates.
