“For it was indubitably a masterpiece these children were creating; a masterpiece devoid of intellectual content, devoid — this was the miracle — of any worldly aim; the masterpiece of their own being.”
-Jean Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles (58)
The aim of youth should be exploration, because it is in our youth that ideas and beauty are so potent they seem to offer actual sustenance. It is that painfully brief moment in time when the world feels expansive, as if everything is open and waiting for you, as if you are endless. It is into this world of lofty ideas and aspirations that Matthew, an American living in Paris, blindly hurls himself, and in doing so discovers the enigmatic siblings Theo and Isabelle.
Set in Paris amid the student protests of 1968, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film The Dreamers is a meditation on youth and art — the ways in which life and art become conflated, how art becomes a part of us, and how we, in our youthful idealism, transform those we love into art. Matthew, played by Michael Pitt, is a 20-year-old studying French who spends all of his time at the Cinémathèque Française where, as he puts it, “I got my real education.” Film is his true passion, and it is at the Cinémathèque that he first notices Theo and Isabelle, played by Louis Garrell and Eva Green, respectively. They are part of a group known as “The Insatiables.” They sit nearest to the cinema screen in an attempt to consume the images as quickly as they are projected with the belief that in doing so, they are witness to a purer image, one unfiltered through the eyes of the other audience members. This unyielding fanaticism forms a kind of blueprint for the blurring between fantasy and reality that can be seen throughout the film and further forms the basis for Theo and Isabelle’s world, one constructed of equal parts passion and obsession. Matthew is instantly drawn to their apparent stoicism and dedication to the experience of film. When they finally meet at a protest, Isabelle and Theo bring Matthew into their home and into their self-contained world of fantasy, where the lines between self and other and between life, art, and reality are subsequently obscured. It is this that serves as the foundation for the portrait of three lives crashing relentlessly into one another.
As soon as Matthew is brought into Isabelle and Theo’s apartment, he is exposed to the ways in which the siblings use films to bond, argue, manipulate, and assess one another. Through their games, they use film to prove their knowledge and their worth. It is as if they are a secret society of two who have cultivated a language all their own, mediated on cinema. They live and breathe film. They use it to celebrate and venerate, to demean and harass. It is not a pastime. It is not a hobby. It is a philosophy that guides them through life, a way to define themselves within and against the world. It is their way of understanding each other and the reason why Matthew bonds so quickly and forcefully with them. They enact scenes from classic films as a way to explore their relationships and their sexuality and, as they do, they become the living embodiment of their passions.
On the morning after Matthew is first brought into their home, Isabelle wakes him by licking his eyelids. She then walks throughout the room in an apparent daze, gently caressing the woodwork and muttering. Matthew, momentarily perplexed, realizes that she is reenacting a scene from Queen Christina (1933) and begins reciting lines along with her. Here, she transforms into Greta Garbo, as in other scenes she transports herself into the worlds of Marlene Dietrich and Jean Seberg. She alters herself into the ideal, bringing Matthew, Theo, and herself into a world of glamour, a world of art and beauty, and externalizing her passion through the medium of existing art. She is becoming the desired and, as a result, creating a world for them far removed from the world of 1968, a world of war and turmoil.
In order to prove that Matthew is worthy of their cloistered and decadent world, the siblings prepare to reenact a scene from Band of Outsiders, the 1964 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. In the scene, the principal characters run through the Louvre, timing how long it takes to get from one end to the other. According to Isabelle, Matthew is the only person they have met that, through his deep regard of film, is worthy enough to break the record with them. And then they are at the Louvre and they are running, with images from the original film interspersed with them as they run. They break the record and, in their breathless excitement, accept Matthew. His knowledge and admiration of film have won him the esteem of the siblings and have gained him access into a secret world that only they inhabit. It is a world of the senses, full of vibrant color, light, and texture, and complete with complex and solemnly regarded rules derived from film, rules that demand an exercise such as the one mentioned above. Being granted access to this world gives Matthew the illusion that his relationships with Theo and Isabelle are ones of sincerity, and it supplies them all with a common language, derived from a single source, with which to communicate their needs and desires. However, these games soon begin to carry with them more sinister sexual implications, and Matthew comes to the realization that he has not been fully transformed into one of them, that he will always be an outsider, isolated by the depth of their bond and always clamouring to be noticed in this circumscribed but lush, aesthetic world.
The constructed reality comes into harsh contrast with the inner emotional lives of its inhabitants when, in a later scene, Isabelle comes into the room where Matthew is, wearing elbow-length black gloves and a sheet around her waist. The moment he sees her, he states, “I’ve always wanted to make love to the Venus de Milo.” She has been so completely transformed into art by her own hand and by the conceptions of the two men near her that they fail to see her as the young woman she is. It is also in this scene that Matthew is first allowed entry into Isabelle’s room, a room she has kept separate and secret from the boys. Matthew realizes as he gazes at the extremely ordinary room that it is no different from the rooms of his sisters in San Diego. The notion of Isabelle as more than an artistic expression, as an individual with an inner life differentiated from Theo, Matthew, or their world of art and film, has never occurred to him, and he is now faced with the true identity and ordinariness of the woman before him. He has never seen her as anything but the image of beauty and art incarnate, for those were the only terms with which she allowed him to see her, and for a brief moment we catch a glimpse of an inner life.
Matthew is thus faced with the sudden understanding that this idealization cannot hold. He is living in a futile world of illusion that is exposed as a mere construction — one that he will never fully be a part of. There are moments of enlightenment, but they swiftly disappear among the decadence of youth and the romanticization of the other as art. At one point in the film, Matthew implores Isabelle to leave the house to go on a date. Outside of the created environment, the illusion begins to break, and thus Matthew initiates the inevitable demise of their relationship. Here we see the danger of exalting self and other as art, of elevating someone until they become inhuman, stone. This endless imagining initially cements their bond and creates a place of fantasy far away from the real world, but it is also because of this fantasy, Matthew realizes, that he will never truly know Isabelle and Theo and they, in turn, will never truly know him. They have reduced one another to beautiful fictions.
Much as the characters venerate film and the process of filmmaking, so too does the film itself, once again blurring the lines between art and life, reality and fantasy. One of the film’s main sites of erotic tension between Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo lies in the process of seeing or watching. Matthew, the outsider, is often found looking out of his window and seeing the siblings in the bathroom together or sleeping side by side, mirror images of one another. As well as cementing Matthew’s role as outsider within the house, the eyes through which we, the audience, are granted access into this world, it is a clear reference to the role of watching as it pertains to filmmaking. This is expanded upon in a later scene. While the three characters are in the bathtub, Matthew begins expounding on film theory, specifically on the notion that all film hinges on voyeurism. The audience is shown the backs of the three main characters, Isabelle flanked by Matthew and Theo on either side. Above the bathtub are a set of three mirrors from which we are able to see the reflections of the three bathers. This scene introduces the notion of film as inherently voyeuristic while creating an accompanying imagery that further cements the point. We see the characters through the camera, which only sees them through their mirrored reflections — a complex series of images based on watching and seeing that expose and exalt the processes inherent to filmmaking. But it is not only this that sets the film up as a meditation on film and its history. Film is an ingrained, pervasive presence throughout The Dreamers, from images of classic film, to orchestral scores, to the red jacket and denim jeans that Matthew wears as a clear homage to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The processes of creation, punctuated by obsession and veneration, are as much a part of the film itself as they are a part of the characters’ lives and their illusory world.
I first saw The Dreamers when I was 19 years old, roughly the same age as Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle. It was a formative film. I was as intoxicated with the characters as they were with themselves. Their desire to live through film seemed almost religious in its enthusiasm. The notion of youth as a time of self-exploration, wherein you can derive a profound joy by being surrounded by and living for ideas, resonated strongly with me during a time when my convictions were as sharp as they would ever be. The film displayed life before it became too complicated, too full of necessity and duty. I too wanted to live for art, in that same childish and selfish way. I too felt the vastness of my possibility. But then I got older, and over time my sense of myself in the world became more realistic, more limited. Part of me will always be that idealistic young woman, the same part of me that feels a sense of freedom when I watch this movie. Life inevitably becomes a series of responsibilities, complications, and large and small traumas that amass over time, and things are no longer simple. You can no longer feed off of concepts and dreams. You have to contend with yourself within the world. You are no longer a self-contained principle, but part of a larger whole. Listlessness is no longer your domain. At the end of The Dreamers, Matthew realizes this and leaves the passion and imagination-fueled home of Theo and Isabelle. And as I watched this film on the eve of my 31st birthday, I felt this very acutely. Much as Matthew becomes exiled from their world, so must we all inevitably leave our youth behind.
