Left alone in Paris in February 1968, twins Isabelle and Théo host the American Matthew in their parents’ apartment – met by chance at the Cinémathèque during the protest against the dismissal of director Henri Langlois – and with him they begin a triangular relationship that heralds disillusionment and surprise. This is, in a nutshell, the plot of The Dreamers, presented out of competition at the 2003 Venice Film Festival, Golden Globe 2004 for best photography. The director replicates the womb-house and sexual transgressions of Last Tango, managing to remove any subversive charge from the actions of the three young people, even though they are immersed in the climate of a truly tumultuous and violent period. In fact, the trio experiences the 1968 movement in the dim light of corridors packed with books, or in the kitchen reduced to a pigsty due to neglect, or canonically on the mattress. “The protagonists of The Dreamers,” said the author, “are not by chance three twenty-year-olds with whom I identified. I put myself in the situation of someone who creates a new world to start over. However, the second departure coincides with the recollection of controversial and “heroic” events that, except for the ending, remain stubbornly out of sight. The two Frenchmen and the American are more interested in cinema and sex than in politics, they devote themselves instead to pleasure between four walls and only go out into the street when a stone breaks the glass of their bedroom window. “La rue est entrée dans la chambre” says Isabelle, or rather public life breaks into private life and undermines an already tenuous particular friendship. In the film Bertolucci synthesizes a good part of his biographical and filmic horizon: cinephilia, life as a dream and cinema as the ideal tool for dreaming, the microcosm against the macrocosm, the truth of emotions and instincts opposed to the fanfares and illusory theaters of History. The work does not seem so much a new beginning as a poignant recapitulation and perhaps also the illustration of a desire that was not realized in the past, that of harmoniously blending commitment and poetry, external and internal, mind and heart. The split remains and still seems so painful as to push the director towards an ambiguous and melodramatic conclusion, in which the police confront the rioters while the unmistakable voice of Edith Piaf resounds around: “Je ne regrette rien”, I regret nothing; a double allusion: to 1968, certainly, but also to the fatal retreat of the French army from the overseas colonies; and the symbolic end of the empire built by the fathers coincides curiously with the scenes of the protest, led and desired by their children.
