Kritiken

”The Dreamers,” which comes close to fetishizing the past it shows us, never re-creates that past in any convincing detail... A filmmaker, of course, has every right to evoke his previous work, but Bertolucci is so drunk on déjá vu he has made a movie that’s really a flossy assemblage of Bertolucci signifiers.

Bertolucci'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. But I was all of those things, and the movie brings back none of my experience. Even the opening details about the Cinémathèque ring false.

An evocative reminiscence of an era when cinema and politics could count for as much as carnal passion, this delicious movie is written and directed with feeling and flair, and played to near perfection by its appealing young leads... Besides being stylish, sexy and witty, the film feels authentic.

The Dreamers recalls moments and moods from so many other films – incorporating footage, landmarks, and music – that Bertolucci’s film never establishes an identity of its own. It becomes a pastiche – a loving, giddy-making pastiche, yes – of other movies, including his own; the themes of incest, intensifying erotic games, and virginity lost are recurring themes for Bertolucci.

The film is extraordinarily beautiful. Bertolucci is one of the great painters of the screen. He has a voluptuous way here of bathing his characters in scenes from great movies, and referring to others.

[Bertolucci's] standoffishness (or objectivity) intermittently marks The Dreamers... But it also renders the film dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

The Dreamers is not as poised as Adair's novel, which comments on life, art and politics with a dry, aphoristic wit that makes one think of Voltaire, James or Wilde. But it's an amusing, sophisticated movie, true to its times, cheerfully erotic, and played with unselfconscious conviction by its three young actors.

Fans of film and gorgeous naked people of either sex will find much here to interest them. But it also has moments that make you want to throw stones.

Bertolucci rightly claims not to have made a film about politics... But Théo's instant transformation from armchair Maoist and domestic slob to ardent militant is glib, his visit to the Sorbonne a nod to a cliché iconography rather than an accurate depiction of events, and money and food shortages figure only in the sense that the three are reduced to drinking papa's vintage Bordeaux.

With its lyrical interpolation of old film clips, The Dreamers celebrates movie love, then goes on to show you the perils of a medium that can’t help but favor masturbatory fantasy over political reality. It doesn’t entirely gel, but few directors could explore the collision of the ego and the outside world with such sympathy or purpose.

''The Dreamers,'' which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence

The Dreamers may go slack when you most want it to soar, but it also seduces with eroticism and resonates with ideas... The film errs only when it tries for a profundity it can’t support. But there’s no denying the thrill when the trio — now possessed of a hard-won self-awareness — gets swept up in the street riots and a new world of danger and possibility. Bertolucci provokes audiences instead of pacifying them.