Nostalgia is highly selective, abridging the past and adjusting it to fit the terms of the present—and often becoming an ideological con job in the process. Those who wax nostalgic about the radicalism of their youth usually imply that the values that made it so attractive back then also make it impossible to hold on to today.
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Gilbert Adair wrote the script, adapting his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents: A Romance, which is, unlike the movie, extremely literary. (The main literary device in the movie, Matthew’s offscreen narration, doesn’t exist in the book.) Adair’s earlier Alice Through the Needle’s Eye (1984) and Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987) are highly adroit pastiches of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie disguised as sequels, and many of his later novels are multifaceted hommages—e.g. Love and Death on Long Island (1990) to Thomas Mann and The Key of the Tower (1998) to Alfred Hitchcock. The Holy Innocents was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and is interesting mainly for the wit and invention of the prose—even the incest has a highly literary pedigree. Despite (or perhaps because of) its autobiographical elements, Adair has long been dissatisfied with the book and systematically refused to consider a movie version until Bertolucci came along. (The two are an interesting match: Bertolucci’s cinema tends to be a heterosexual project that flirts with homosexuality, and Adair’s fiction tends to be a homosexual project that flirts with heterosexuality.) Adair has hinted that a revision is coming, and the film contains substantial changes in the plot, though some of them are probably as much Bertolucci’s as Adair’s. Among the additions to the original story are the heroine’s loss of virginity, belying her apparent sophistication, and Matthew’s efforts to separate her from Theo and take her out on a “normal” date—both of which smack of the Freudian revisionism that has been part of Bertolucci’s thinking for some time. Among the more striking deletions are sex between Matthew and Theo, a visit the threesome makes to a castle in Normandy, and Matthew’s death in a street demonstration.
In his unabashedly nostalgic four-star review of the film Roger Ebert, who’s only slightly older than I am, recalls being a tourist in the Left Bank in May ’68 and getting hit with rubber truncheons during a police charge. I checked into a hotel there in mid-June, just after the police had taken back the nearby Odeon Theatre from the student rebels and cleared away the makeshift street barricades, though parts of trees that had been chopped down for the barricades still lay along Boulevard Saint-Michel, and the city still felt strangely energized. I found myself fleeing a police charge one day and getting a potent whiff of tear gas on another. But I remained in Paris for the rest of the summer, moved into a flat in the neighborhood the following fall, and wound up a Cinematheque regular. Adair, who’d moved to Paris in ’68, was another and became a good friend.
In essence, The Dreamers is a fairy tale designed for teenagers in Cincinnati, and I don’t mean this in a snooty way, because teenagers there—and elsewhere, for that matter—could do a lot worse. The only problem is, American teenagers who aren’t 18 technically can’t see it because of the NC-17 rating. NC-17 films traditionally do poor business, and a Variety reporter—knowing that the interests of artists and audiences count for little alongside the bank accounts of industry people—recently chided Fox Searchlight Pictures for not cutting the film to get a better rating. All these kids do is eat, drink, see movies, smoke a joint, bathe together, masturbate, and have sex—until one of them tosses a Molotov cocktail in the final reel. But if Adair and Bertolucci had sliced and diced their characters the way Quentin Tarantino chopped up his in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, The Dreamers might well have been given an R rating.
I’m thoroughly repulsed by the generational one-upmanship in the assumption that if you weren’t lucky enough to be young, in Paris, etc, in 1968 you might as well roll over and die. “I don’t know about you,” my oldest French friend said to me two weeks ago, “but I sure wasn’t having a great sex life in May 1968.” If my sex life improved once I moved to Paris, it was mainly because French culture taught me ways of finding pleasure with less guilt—May ’68 had little to do with it. And however much I might nostalgically boast about the police charge and tear gas in June ’68, they were tokens of a failed revolution.
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Written by Gilbert Adair
With Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Robin Renucci, and Anna Chancellor.
