Product Description

Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Michael Pitt. The sensual tale of three film lovers whose casual friendship evolves when their passion for movies becomes a passion for each other. A scintillating tale directed by Academy Award winner Bernardo Bertolucci. 2004/color/115 min/NC-17/widescreen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2694 in DVD
• Brand: Fox
• Released on: 2004-07-13
• Rating: NC-17
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Dimensions: .16 pounds
• Running time: 115 minutes

Amazon.com
A love letter to movies (and the French new wave of the 1960s in particular), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers starts with a 1968 riot outside of a Parisian movie palace then burrows into an insular love triangle. Matthew (Michael Pitt, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), an expatriate American student, bonds with a twin brother and sister, Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), over their mutual love of film--they not only quote lines of dialogue, they act out small bits and challenge each other to name the cinematic source. Matthew suspects the twins of incest, but that doesn't stop him from falling into his own intimacies with Isabelle. As the threesome becomes threatened, Paris succumbs to student riots. The Dreamers aspires to be kinky, but the results are more decorative than decadent; nonetheless, the movie's lively energy recalls the careless and vital exuberance of Godard and Truffaut. --Bret Fetzer

DVD features
Though The Dreamers is rife with naked flesh, the DVD extras focus more on history and politics--one featurette describes the student unrest of May 1968, which led to national strikes (at one point, 10 million workers were on strike); Gilbert Adair, who adapted the screenplay from his novel, describes the lingering smell that hung over Paris from uncollected garbage and residual tear gas. A making-of featurette is impressively in-depth, richly exploring the intersection of cinema, politics, and sex in director Bernardo Bertolucci's mind. Then the commentary track itself features three different perspectives: Bertolucci focuses on the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the film, Adair discusses its relationship to his own experience in 1968 and the process of adaptation, and producer Jeremy Thomas lays out a more logistical perspective on the making of the movie. All in all, a dense and fertile exploration of the movie's development. The NC-17 cut is the version that played in theaters. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
An American college student named Matthew (Michael Pitt) is in Paris in 1968 and soaking up as many movies as he can. When the government cracks down on the state-sponsored Cinémathèque Française, he gets caught up in the demonstrations and meets a red-bereted beauty named Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother, Théo (Louis Garrel), who has the looks of a debauched medieval priest. The director, Bernardo Bertolucci, loves to create a hothouse. In "Last Tango in Paris," he used enclosed space to explore the limits of romantic desire, but here the conceit is a different kind of exuberance: cinephilia. Isabelle, Théo, and Matthew argue endlessly about movies and see themselves as characters playing roles. As the three embark on increasingly risqué sexual games, Bertolucci longs to re-create the moment when film, politics, and sex mutually reinforced each other as the preoccupations of youth. It's a saddening nostalgia, and the movie, despite its attempt to shock us with incest and perversities, has an air of inconsequence about it. The three aren't making a revolution in this hothouse, they're making a listless blue movie. In French and English. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker