Bernardo Bertolucci
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And in one of the most exotic scenes, Isabelle imitates Greta Garbo in Queen Christina caressing the furniture while remembering a special night of love.
I loved watching the various homages (including a lovely bit where Eva Green blends into the "Queen Christina"-era Greta Garbo) and I even discovered, after a while, a bit of affection for that questionable finale.
Likewise, it's positively dreamy when Isabelle reenacts a scene from "Queen Christina," starring Greta Garbo, that's spliced in with her homage, and fairly engages in a back-and-forth exchange with Jean Seberg in "Breathless."
Both Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933) and next week’s Asheville Film Society showing of Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932)—both fine in their own right—were deliberately placed as lead-ins to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003).
Often compared with the controversial films Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) and In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976) for its graphic depiction of sexuality, Patrice Chereau's Intimacy (2001) continues in a similar, notorious vein of provocative contemporary cinema, most notably in the perturbative films of Catherine Breillat, that seeks to demystify the conventional, often romanticized presentation of sexuality and capture the stark realism, awkwardness, and imperfection of the act of physical intimacy.
This bleak reflection on the meaning of human intimacy and romantic relationships recalls both "Last Tango in Paris," although here the central relationship touches more than the people engaged in it and "An Affair of Love," although that film's melancholy is replaced with something deeper and darker here.
As a sort of retelling of Last Tango in Paris, the film is a fairly fascinating study of Jay (Mark Rylance), a bartender, and his weekly trick an actress named Claire (Kerry Fox).
Not since Last Tango in Paris has a film so ravishingly explored the many fine connections between desire, physical intimacy, and romance.
Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, a film that not only inspired the Nouvelle Vague, but also brilliantly challenged U.S. political institutions and moral presumptions.
In the first sequence, before the film has a chance to find its own point of view and its own images, The Dreamers is already basking in the reflected light and shadow of greatness, as Matthew watches Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque.
If Sam Fuller 's Cinémathèque fave Shock Corridor imagined the inmates taking over the asylum, the early "events of May," 1968, found the audience in the theater becoming actors in the streets.
"The Dreamers" kicks off with the first protests over the Langlois firing, seen through the eyes of Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American who has come to Paris to "study", though he seems to have spent all of his time in the front row of the Cinematheque ("We wanted to get the images first") soaking up things like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Shock Corridor".
In the scene close to the opening of The Dreamers when the threesome watch Fuller's Shock Corridor at the Cinémathèque, Bertolucci's way of filming the relationship between spectator and image sets it apart from the cinema scenes in the other films mentioned.
He begins with a clip from Fuller's masterpiece Shock Corridor (1963), but The Dreamers doesn't move with any Fuller-like intensity, any of that crackling, pulp immediacy It hasn't learned anything from Fuller.
In other words, the threesome's delight in replaying scenes from Band of Outsiders and Jules and Jim is shared by the director, for whom the art of making love to the French New Wave is nothing new.
Suddenly idle, they spend their time trading memories of beloved films and even acting them out -- in one scene, the trio re-enact the race through the Louvre from Godard'sBand of Outsiders.
Instead, they spend their days recreating moments from classic cinema (they go tearing through the length of the Louvre, hoping to beat the time of the characters in "Band of Outsiders"), debating film theory (including the inevitable discussion on the worth of Jerry Lewis) and engage in trivia contests, with those unable to supply the correct answer forced to pay an embarrassing "penalty".
Matthew, Isabelle, and Theo ( Louis Garrel ) cocoon themselves in the twin's apartment and test each other through a series of games, acting out favorite scenes from the films that inspire them; in an inspired move of his own, Bertolucci integrates classic scenes seamlessly into the plot: breathless Anna Karina running through the Louvre in Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders is followed by breathless Eva Green racing the same halls.
Perhaps the most exciting scene has our heroes leaving their apartment for a rare trip into Paris, duplicating the scene in Godard's Band of Outsiders where the three main characters race through the Louvre in record time.
The scenes in the villa in Rome with Bellucci are shot as if something out of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist , with mirrors to the fore and the use of dark gilt furnishings.
And the Rome sequence, with Monica Bellucci as a mob widow who seems to have inherited the vintage lingerie style of Sophia Loren, in turn carries visual echoes of The Conformist , The Great Beauty , and The Italian Job .
Hoyte van Hoytema (who shot the very different espionage classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ) films the Italian sequences with a shadowy indulgence that recalls Vittorio Storaro’s work on The Conformist .
During his contrived climax, Bertolucci�s use of the sublime ending of Mouchette only makes apparent the hopelessness of his attempt to give The Dreamers a dignity it doesn�t deserve.
Even when Isabelle's attempt at suicide is intercut with the suicide from Bresson's Mouchette (1967) it seems more like a spontaneous expression of her sense of tragedy than an intellectual comment on her action.
I love how they are able to find in the cinema a set of moral standards � a clip from Freaks demonstrates their sense of camaraderie as much as one from Mouchette demonstrates a sense of moral consequence or Marlene Dietrich�s Blonde Venus song and dance routine keys them into the exoticism of sex.
Given the plot, it's odd that Truffaut's Jules and Jim is never alluded to in any way, and the references to other movies that are included usually work better for the Cincinnati crowd (with its narrower choices) than for Parisians or Chicagoans (except for the one most American viewers are likely to find inexplicable -- clips from the end of Robert Bresson's Mouchette to contextualize a suicide attempt, which I found offensive).
I love how they are able to find in the cinema a set of moral standards � a clip from Freaks demonstrates their sense of camaraderie as much as one from Mouchette demonstrates a sense of moral consequence or Marlene Dietrich�s Blonde Venus song and dance routine keys them into the exoticism of sex.
Some of these moments are inspired, as when Isabelle can-cans with a mop, her dance intercut with footage from the film she's emulating, in this case "Blonde Venus," starring Marlene Dietrich.
The Dreamers is based on Gilbert Adairâs novel of the same name, which was based on Melvilleâs Fifties film Les Enfants Terribles (which was itself based on the novel by Jean Cocteau).
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.
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
influenced by Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Themes
Despite citing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris as a tonal touchstone, and nodding cheekily to American Gigolo/Psycho, the result smacks more of Adrian Lyne’s blandly naff 9½ Weeks, the S&M frankness of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse usurped by the archaic softcore of Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O.
Dornan could have answered, “Have you seen The Story of O.?” Anyone who’s old enough to remember the old fear and hysteria caused by S&M movies like Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour and Tim Blake Nelson’s O and Adrian Lyne’s Nine 1/2 Weeks; or anyone who’s seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and the trashily vicious Color of Night; or anyone who’s watched Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in the imperfectly exciting Secretary, or watched Girls’s audacious second season or any year of Sex and the City is likely to leave Fifty Shades of Grey perplexed by its uncontroversial mildness.
(Could Bertolucci's 30-year-old Last Tango in Paris be anything but Breathless for heavy breathers, complete with climactic big bang?)
And I should point out that the French love of America reflected in the plot of The Dreamers, and Godard's Breathless before it, continues unabated, even if the American love of France appears to be on the wane.
Likewise, it's positively dreamy when Isabelle reenacts a scene from "Queen Christina," starring Greta Garbo, that's spliced in with her homage, and fairly engages in a back-and-forth exchange with Jean Seberg in "Breathless."
What "Something in the Air" has that "No" doesn't, however, are beautiful young people (hello, Carole Combes and Lola Créton), sometimes in states of undress, although the nudity never becomes the movie's raison d'être, as it sometimes seemed to in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film inspired by the 1968 Paris student riots, "The Dreamers."
Not having seen the first movie, I can't offer a comparison of the two, though the pretty actors and counterculture nostalgia kept reminding me of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
But — like the similar, stronger "The Dreamers" — it does capture the high emotionalism of a very specific point in a person's life, where the magnitude of the injustices around you is surpassed only by the firm belief that you and your friends alone know an easy way to end them.
Of course, Gilles is a stand-in for Assayas, who is a former film critic, so there's a wholeness to the movie's conception, a sense that his sensibility is shining through in every frame — though compared to the operatic fever-dream of Bernardo Bertolucci's daring, transgressive, NC-17-rated " The Dreamers " (2003), it's pretty tepid stuff.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film “The Dreamers,” set three years earlier, covered much the same ground — love, cinema, revolution — with about 50 times as much color and passion.
In other words, the threesome's delight in replaying scenes from Band of Outsiders and Jules and Jim is shared by the director, for whom the art of making love to the French New Wave is nothing new.
Given the plot, it's odd that Truffaut's Jules and Jim is never alluded to in any way, and the references to other movies that are included usually work better for the Cincinnati crowd (with its narrower choices) than for Parisians or Chicagoans (except for the one most American viewers are likely to find inexplicable -- clips from the end of Robert Bresson's Mouchette to contextualize a suicide attempt, which I found offensive).
The Dostoevsky novella served as the official source of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1968, barricades-busting Partner, and has also inspired dozens of doppelgänger movies, from Fight Club to the recent Enemy, Denis Villeneuve’s drab drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of strangers no one could tell apart.
In 1968, just before his breakout "The Conformist," Bernardo Bertolucci tackled this surreal tale about a lowly office worker's psychotic break in "Partner," starring the pretty French actor Pierre Clementi -- who actually looks quite like Eisenberg, whose terrific performance balances the easily frustrated neurosis of Simon with the smooth debonair of the smarmy James.
Over thirty years later, the times have changed, but Bertolucci is exploring similar themes with British author Gilbert Adair, adapting his own 1988 novel, "The Holy Innocents".
Gilbert Adair wrote the script, adapting his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents: A Romance, which is, unlike the movie, extremely literary.
The Dreamers is based on a novel called The Holy Innocents by the sometime film critic Gilbert Adair, who adapted it for the screen—and who has, unprecedentedly, rewritten it into a book called The Dreamers.
It often recalls the resolution of Berlotucci’s The Sheltering Sky , perhaps not in specific practice (Pollack doesn’t cameo in the same way as Paul Bowles did in that film, and his narration is more specific to the tale rather than providing it a gorgeous coda), but it’s astonishing in own right, capturing the language and tone of the book while using its detail to enhance our perception of the characters’ deepest thoughts.
Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
influenced by Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Dreamers (2003)
Themes Visuals
Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose previous film “Black Venus” was also controversial in regard to the treatment of his leading lady, combines the subject matter of the new wave landmark “The 400 Blows” with the notoriety of “Last Tango in Paris.”
Bernardo Bertolucci became famous for his on-set trickery and emotional abuse; Maria Schneider said she felt as if she had been raped after the famous anal-sex scene with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.”
In short, there are—as Spielberg, of all people, will have noticed—more traces of Truffaut here than there are of “Last Tango in Paris.”
This is not undiscovered country to any filmgoers who witnessed the full frontal couplings in "Shortbus," "9 Songs," "Antichrist," "The Dreamers," "Romance" or "Eyes Wide Shut," but the simply curious may feel it flies too close to the sun.
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
influenced by The Sheltering Sky (1990), Stealing Beauty (1996), Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Visuals Themes
In a recent interview with The Guardian , Hammer revealed that Guadagnino showed him a few minutes of Debra Winger in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990) to inspire him for this scene, and that was clearly an ideal choice.
(Another Bertolucci technique; think of the opening shot in The Sheltering Sky, when Kit and Port emerge from behind a complex wooden structure in the desert.)
Set in 1983, director Luca Guadagnino’s love story calls to mind another romantic coming-of-age film set in northern Italy: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 epic Stealing Beauty.
“Call Me by Your Name” joins the same continuum of other blissful set-in-Italy American vacation/romance porn such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Chocolat,” “Stealing Beauty,” “Letters to Juliet,” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” etc. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom knows how to catch a scene so that you can almost feel the temperature in a room, and the subtle shifts between indoor and outdoor light, between humid afternoons and hot clear nights, pass over the screen in an absolutely palpable way.
Compared with Beloved or any number of films dealing with down-to-earth sexual feelings that go wild — whether Last Tango in Paris , Stealing Beauty , Being 17 , or this year’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo — Call Me By Your Name is trite.
The world depicted here is so glossily perfect that this feels like a film less about life than about lifestyle—not unlike a similar long-hot-Italian-summer movie, Stealing Beauty by Bertolucci (the subject of a 2013 documentary by Guadagnino and editor Walter Fasano).
Released in 1932, "Freaks" has been accepted in the classic-film canon for decades, and Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci paid loving homage in "The Dreamers" (2004), by having his characters chant the film's most famous line: "We accept you.
No sooner does a character mention or contemplate À bout de souffle, Bande à part, Freaks, or some other classic than clips from the movie appear.
I love how they are able to find in the cinema a set of moral standards � a clip from Freaks demonstrates their sense of camaraderie as much as one from Mouchette demonstrates a sense of moral consequence or Marlene Dietrich�s Blonde Venus song and dance routine keys them into the exoticism of sex.
Inside, these borderline incestuous siblings admit Matthew into their freaky psychosexual playpen (complete with interpolations from Tod Browning's Freaks), where he explores the connection (or lack thereof) between uninhibited sex and existential freedom (a recurring Bertolucci motif).
Before the revolution comes crashing in near the end, Bertolucci's young lovers--whose freak flag is a huge poster of La Chinoise hung over the mattress--have scarcely noticed that there's a riot going on.
The prominently displayed La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) poster on Theo's wall notwithstanding, the cinema The Dreamers draws on is more '59 than '68, the giddy thrill of new found moral and aesthetic freedom, as well as celebration of youthfulness, in certain works of the early New Wave À Bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), Une Femme est une femme (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961), Shoot the Pianist (François Truffaut, 1961), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962).
An Affair of Love (1999)
Directed by Frédéric Fonteyne
influenced by Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Themes Plot
If you're anticipating the next "Last Tango in Paris," think again.
If the scenario sounds familiar, that's because it's a rethinking of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris , in which two strangers took an apartment together for anonymous sex.
An elegantly droll romance, this feels rather like a belated riposte to Last Tango in Paris.
The implicit rule is that there will be no mention whatsoever of their lives outside the room, a "Last Tango in Paris" all over again.