Delayed Reaction: The Dreamers

Premise: A film buff in Paris in the 1960s gets taken in by free-spirited and codependent twins.

I haven’t seen many Bernardo Bertolucci movies. Just Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and now this. Based on that small sample size, I’ll call The Last Emperor the outlier, because Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers really feels like a filmmaker making the same movie 30 years apart. Both had X/NC-17 Ratings. Both were set in Paris with American drifters. Appropriately, I also came away from both unsure what the point of it was.

The key thing to The Dreamers is that Eva Green has never been bad. It’s sad that she’s in a Tim Burton ghetto. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure people would be clamoring for her to get a long overdue Oscar nomination by now. To date, she doesn’t have a single Oscar or Emmy nomination. The problem is that she elevates things more often than she appears in things that are great to begin with. Does anyone else remember how she took 300: Rise of an Empire by the balls and made it watchable? Anyway, The Dreamers was her debut film and it’s a “who the hell is that?” performance. Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt are good too, but Green is the standout. I won’t pretend that the promise of nakedness played no part in my decision to see this movie. I’ll put it this way though. Had the film starred not Eva Green, my reaction would look something like this:

I guess it’s cool that Bertolucci got a chance to fanboy about his favorite hip movies when he was a young film nerd, and I’ll never turn down some good nakedness, but what was the point of this movie? Was this just his apology for spending his youth having sex and watching movies rather than joining protests?

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend