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film :: Interview :: Bernardo Bertolucci

Those among our generation who aren’t film majors or cinephiles may not necessarily know Bernardo Bertolucci by name, but most will certainly recognize his most renowned credits, ranging from the controversial but barrier-breaking Last Tango in Paris to the Oscar-dominating epic The Last Emperor to Liv Tyler’s debut, Stealing Beauty.

With his latest film, The Dreamers, however, it’s precisely our generation that the Italian filmmaker is reaching out to touch. Though the Fox Searchlight film has received a fair share of publicity because it is the first studio-backed NC-17-rated movie to see a release in six years, Bertolucci seems more intent on stimulating his viewer’s minds and motives than well, stimulating them in a more lewd manner.

“I didn’t want to do a history story,” Bertolucci says at a recent press day at New York’s Essex House Hotel. The Dreamers takes place in Paris in the spring of 1998, just as a student uprising against the de Gaulle government and police brutality begins that will eventually lead to massive rioting.

He continues, “In that sense I think it was political. I wanted to communicate with the young generation of today that there was another young generation not so long ago very different from them, very idealistic, and with an incredible power of imagination and dreams. The people in ’68 (were) fascinated by the fact that it was possible to mix up politics with cinema and with sex and with rock ‘n’ roll."

“One thing I’ve said is that I hoped this film could wake up a half-sleeping youth which has kind of resigned to life to be flat, to be bland, without faith or hope. Look, not so long ago the youth had a completely different, more lively energy.”

Of course it can’t hurt that accompanying Bertolucci’s message is a story chock full of intimacy and sexuality, and like in Last Tango,these elements are incorporated in a splendid, unconventional and oftentimes uncomfortable manner. The film centers on Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American film buff studying abroad.

When Matthew meets the luscious Paris native Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother Theo (Louis Garrell), the threesome bond at a rapid pace and before you know it the siblings have asked their new friend to move into their beautiful home (in which their bohemian parents have taken a month-long holiday from).

All addicts of the cinema, the two guys and a girl play high-risk games of dare involving movie trivia. The stakes are high, and unsurprisingly turn sexual between Isabelle and Matthew, who diffidently suspects there may be some incest between his new girlfriend and her brother.

The film’s sex scenes are graphic and revealing, and halfway through the film the MPAA’s rating is no longer so surprising. But had different circumstances arisen, we may have been forced to watch an edited version. Fox Searchlight was reportedly trying to avoid the harsh, box office-stifling label at all costs, even prompting Bertolucci to publicly express his concerns, saying he was afraid his film would be “amputated and mutilated.”

Of course, Bertolucci’s no stranger to controversy. The unbridled sexuality of his 1972 film Last Tango shocked audiences at the time of its release before ultimately winning over critics, hoarding a cache of Oscar nominations, including a directing nod for Bertolucci and a Best Actor nod for star Marlon Brando.

Joking that he was “older” then, the Parma-born director says his latest tango in Paris moviemaking is “much more joyous and lighter than ‘Last Tango.’ Here, the characters are very much (finding) the happiness of discovering new things. Here, these kids are opening a new book, something new. I think (Brando’s character Paul) was closing a book.”

Touching briefly on points surrounding the contemporary political climate, Bertolucci references the mass protests to the Iraq war last spring (“Americans are not at this moment very beloved,” he says) and points out a paradox in contrasting the pacifism of Matthew (a potential Vietnam dodger) and the violent actions of the French students with their respective countrymen’s current stances on war and peace.

Still, though, he can’t see author Gilbert Adair’s story adapted in a modern setting: “Today, you cannot find the same intimate relationship with politics” among younger crowds,” he explains. In ’68, “It was kind of a fusion of individualism and (being part of) a collective. I think that the kids (involved in) the events of ’68 didn’t feel addicted to (the movement) because what they were doing was in some way transgressive… transgression is a word we used a lot. And today you never hear it. The young people today never use the word transgression.”

2004 1-42 Online