About
The Dreamers

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” (2003) is one of his most intellectually challenging films – not less than “The Conformist” (1970), and even more semantically intricate than his “The Spider’s Stratagem” (1970). It is a film about the pernicious influence of repression of infantile sexual urge (incestuous desire) on person’s psychological development. “The Dreamers” depicts incestuous brother/sister twins in their early twenties (Isabelle and Theo) tormented by their barren sexual fixation on each other. If they could give themselves to their desire they would go through and out of it to sexual adulthood (incestuous need makes sex more important than it really is exactly because it is forbidden). But beautiful French twins are psychologically repressed and therefore stay forever fixated on their infantile sexual obsession. So, they instinctively need a sexual ersatz-object which unexpectedly became personified, for them, by their recent American friend (Matthew) who has his own psychological complex that makes it possible for him to agree to be sexually involved with Isabelle in spite of not being loved by her and despite the fact that he himself was just attracted to her beauty and sexiness (without amorous complications). According to Bertolucci’s images, this whole situation is quite common and widespread in Western civilization, and this allows the director to make daring generalizations about why young people, with all alleged openness of democratic societies to humanistic progress, are not able to promote social change towards a more democratic life. Fixation on infantile sexual object of those who (like Isabelle and Theo) are traumatized by their unconscious or conscious incestuous desires, and proclivity of many who (like Matthew) are ready to mate with a sexually attractive object without a simultaneous amorous need - are two halves of Western youth with sexual life as a symptom of emotional and psychological underdevelopment. One group needs incestuous ersatz-object and leads a pseudo-conventional sexual life, and both groups need to be passionately occupied with artifacts to which they are emotionally tied symbiotically, in infantile manner (consumer goods, hobby or technical toys) inside today’s omnipresent mass-cultural setting. That’s why the drama of our “dreamers” takes place amidst the student rebellion in Paris in May 1968, and all three of them are hooked on cinema like a child on his/her toy (they use cinema instead of living; they live inside the films, their love for cinema has a symbiotic immediacy that is characteristic of consumerist tie between subject and things he/she possesses or images or ideas he/she bonds with). Repressed incestuous object (Theo) in Isabelle’s life returns/reincarnates as incestuous ersatz-object (Matthew) and as incestuous artifacts (cinema for all three main characters). The film includes a lot of sexual action and multifaceted (and multi-angled) nudity, but everything in it is colored by Bertolucci’s sadness about the lost existential direction of our civilization. Does he love young people? He is worried about their general sensibility distorted by psychological repressiveness and ideological and consumerist predatoriness of today’s society. Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read the essay about “The Dreamers” and other Bertolucci’s films (with analysis of stills), and also articles on films by Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Bresson, Pasolini, Antonioni, Alan Tanner, Cavani, Fassbinder, Anne-Marie Mieville, Werner Herzog, Ken Russell, Wim Wenders, Maurice Pialat, Jerzy Skolimowski, Rossellini, Moshe Mizrahi and Ronald Neame. By Victor Enyutin