The danger is getting lost in fantasy, of being consumed by the lunar flame of lamplight filtered through celluloid. And the irony is that directors, the good ones, are already lost and have been for years. There have been pictures about an all-devouring cinephilia before (Cinema Paradiso, say, or 8½), and now a pair of films by two directors at opposite ends of their careers--Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Aaron Woodley's 2003 TIFF Discovery Award-winner Rhinoceros Eyes--strive to blur the line between movies and reality in twin tales of sexual maturation, of coming of age in a movie house--of, to parse The Judybats, learning how to kiss watching James Dean movies. Fascinatingly, the two films share Michael Pitt, forging a path for himself as the archon for the modern dreamer raised on lethal doses of popular culture, and weaning himself from that luxuriant udder only with great difficulty.

Matthew (Pitt) is an American in Paris in Bertolucci's film, recalling Marlon Brando's bee-stung, world-drunk expatriate in Bertolucci's own Last Tango in Paris just as the film echoes the intimate microcosmic orbits of the ménage a trois from Bertolucci's 1900. He meets twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) at Henri Langlois' Cinematheque Française in 1968, taking in endless revivals of Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and Robert Bresson from the front rows, swathed in the nimbus of cigarette smoke and pretension of these members of the exclusive, delirious cult of adolescence. As illustrated in the film, when Langlois was sacked as curator in May of 1968, there arose among the buffs such a clamour that grey-suited riot police came to bludgeon protestors like Godard, Truffaut, Jean Marais, and Jean Renoir--film, the medium of our time, for a delirious moment, became the catalyst for a new French Revolution, the Cinematheque a cathedral and Bastille.

But The Dreamers isn't about Paris' 1968 cultural revolution in a literal sense, choosing instead to use its setting as the backdrop for a chamber piece about Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle, left alone in the siblings' parents' flat. Cloistered away in the middle of the conflagration, their obsession with film musters and explodes without the viable outlet of the Cinematheque, manifesting in a series of sadistic, often sexual games centered on movie knowledge and the price of ignorance. Bertolucci cuts these scenes with clips from a wonderful selection of classic cinema: Garbo memorizing her room in Queen Christina, Nadine Nortier's suicide in Bresson's Mouchette, Fred Astaire waking Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Odile, Arthur, and Franz's sprint through the Louvre in Bande á part, and so on--asking his young actors to mimic these scenes in motions that are part trance, part tango. At its best, without the direct reference, The Dreamers pings off the jubilant energy of Breathless.

The suggestion, and it's one drunk with sublimity, is that our relationship with film transcends articulation, encompassing philosophy, politics, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and pot-spiced bubble baths that last a day in one giant, sloppy, beautiful clinch. The memories of the films that we watch are as vivid as (read: more vivid than) the memories of our lives, and, in point of fact, there's no substantive difference between them in terms of their affect on the substance of our selves. The heroes of The Dreamers are stars of their own suspended matinee; when they ultimately join the riots seething along the Champs Elysées, Matthew's chilling observation that the throng is an epic comprised completely of extras, not idols, comes to pass.

Disturbingly, Bertolucci, a poet raised on the cinema in Langlois' Cinematheque, a "true artist" now refusing interviews to anyone not associated with a "major daily," has crafted a film that talks about growing out of movie love as something inevitable and to be accepted with resignation. There isn't so much growth on the part of his trio as there is a clarification of the stratified stereotypes in which each of the characters is straitjacketed. Its conclusion makes of The Dreamers standard fare: the death of the dream in the film is the death of the dream outside of the film, and where once Bertolucci would have found fruit in the refuge of illusion, and value in the celebration of cinematic half-life, he can now only find futility in bearing up against the inexorable tide of the real. The Dreamers is a betrayal of dreaming.

Rhinoceros Eyes is an embrace of dreaming as Chep (Pitt), cocooned in a decrepit moviehouse, sneaks away nightly to watch the same B-movie soaper, to return, popcorn in hand, the voyeur of the undressed windows along his path home. Matthew says in The Dreamers' best scene that film is a crime, and sure enough, Chep witnesses a crime in a neighbour's framed tableau vivant, only to pass it off as entertainment to be dismissed and forgotten. Repressed at best, strange at least, half-verbal Chep finds a kindred spirit of sorts in Fran (Paige Turco), a prop manager for a local production who has a mania for "real" props and the perfect gofer in Chep and his dream factory. Fran acts as a catalyst for Chep's sexual maturation, inspiring something like an Oedipal split for him from the womb of his warehouse mother, allowing him to be a provider and forcing him to venture into the world. The film is, at its heart, a gothic romance, one that resembles The Hunchback of Notre Dame the most in its tale of a societal freak cloistered away in a cathedral, falling in doomed love with a member of the beautiful people who, herself, and unbeknownst to him, is a member of "the other."

Director Woodley uses stop-motion animation inspired by Jan Svankmeyer and the Brothers Quay to mark Chep's evolution from emotional infant to actualized adolescent, the first manifestation a baby on umbilicus, the second a toddler, the third a child, et cetera, into the final iteration of puppet as mature Chep, ready to leave behind the fantasy of his youth for the promise represented by a shy ticket-taker. Rhinoceros Eyes is a lovely, dark fairy tale told in unembarrassed allegory with verve and intelligence. It's a cautionary tale about the lure of fantasy making of the audience a stolen child, but unlike The Dreamers, its ultimate message isn't one of being deposited into the empty yawp of a sea of teeming extras, but of finding in an infancy of dreaming the seeds of individualism and poetry. When Chep offers a miniature Merry-Go-Round to his new love, it's not a futile gesture of the recently disabused, but an heirloom of sorts, passed down from his celluloid mother to her prospective replacement.

Both visually lush (Woodley's shot entirely on HiDef 24p DV), both about cinema in a way that my favourite films are, and both featuring excellent performances from Pitt, what distinguishes Rhinoceros Eyes from The Dreamers is a naïveté about the enduring power of film that enchants. Where The Dreamers leaves the feeling that Bertolucci doesn't trust in the music the way that he used to, Rhinoceros Eyes still brims with the possibilities of film to be nurse and companion, teacher and confidant, lover and parent. Where Rhinoceros Eyes is about dreaming, The Dreamers is about waking up, and while the conversation about our multifoliate relationship to our art is endlessly fruitful, it's both dispiriting and hopeful that when one of film's brightest lights begins to dim, searching the streets for an angry fix as it were, others are hungry to howl in his place.-Walter Chaw

THE DREAMERS
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD
Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada

the critic

Published: February 13, 2004