Every once in a while a film comes along that restores my faith in the art form. Months of suffering through generic blockbusters, uninspired "independent" films and various dodgy foreign films that are supposedly good because the people watching them get to feel superior to those who don't do subtitles. All of this is worthwhile for that occasional good film that makes it worth repeating the entire process for. The Dreamers is one of those films.

Heading into it, I really wasn't elated at the idea of what I'd be seeing. Thanks to the flaws in the marketing, I was under the impression that I'd be seeing one, or all of the following:

a) An entirely foreign language film.
b) A love letter to a bunch of films that I hadn't seen.
c) A tediously dull film where nothing really happened.
d) Something that bordered on the pornographic.

Happily, I quickly discovered that only one of those assumptions was correct. The film is indeed a love letter to classic cinemas from the 1930s through the 1960s, but the fact I hadn't seen the majority of them didn't matter. Director Bernardo Bertolucci loves them, and so his characters love them. Thanks to the skill displayed here, because the characters love them, we get to share in it. While we only get to see snippets of the films involved, it doesn't matter, as we still understand their importance to the story. I'm sure someone familiar with all of them might get a little more of a kick out of it all, but not having seen them really doesn't hurt the viewing of the film.

In The Dreamers, we follow Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American in Paris at the same time as the student riots of 1968. He quickly meets Isabelle (Eva Green), a French girl at the heart of the protests, and almost instantly falls in love with her. During this meeting though, we also meet Theo (Louis Garrel), Isabelle's twin. They both befriend Matthew, and as their parents are away, invite him to come and live with them.

Matthew is elated to have met some French friends, and settles in quickly within their apartment. Things become a little darker when one night he spots Isabelle and Theo sleeping together. He makes nothing of it, but as he spends longer at the apartment, he discovers the sexual politics of the family, and is pulled into it all. At first he is reluctant, but quickly becomes almost a third twin of Isabelle and Theo.

I probably haven't done the film justice from the synopsis above. It sounds a lot darker than it should, and one of the remarkable things about The Dreamers is its ability to suddenly move from sexual activities that may make the viewer slightly uncomfortable to more light hearted moments. The film is peppered with these, such as a scene where all three of them go running through the Louvre in an attempt to simply beat the time set by characters doing the same in Bands Apart. All of the characters rate cinema as being as important as sex (if not at times as the same thing) and this allows a lighter air to mix with the darker sexual moments.

As for most of my assumptions earlier, they were nearly all wrong. The film is not a foreign language film, despite looking like one and being set entirely in Paris. Of course there are small elements of dialog in French, but the vast majority is in English. Of course, as outlined above, I found the film to be far from dull, which simply leaves the pornographic charge. Yes, the film is incredibly graphic (it was the first film in six years to be issued with the NC-17 rating in the US), but never gratuitously so. It is never explicit just for the sake of explicitness. All of the actions within the film do service the plot in one way or another.

The cast are by and large fantastic. Nobody puts a foot wrong in this, with Pitt portraying the sexual naivety of Matthew as the perfect foil to the sexual liberation of Isabelle and Theo. It is however Eva Green that shocks during the film. She manages to make a difficult role her own, never once slipping up, as a lesser actor so easily could. She has a stunning screen presence that just commands the audience to pay attention to her. Take a scene early on in the film where Matthew is invited to dinner by Theo and Isabelle with their parents. The film involves five characters, and four of them speak throughout the scene. Isabelle remains silent throughout, at yet from just her mannerisms, it is clear that she has played a pivotal part of the dinner. She manages this all through the film, something all the more remarkable considering this is her first acting role.

Overall, The Dreamers is a stunning film. The drama is among the best I have seen in a long time, and the themes covered during the film actually mean something rather than being based on the petty sexual desires that make up a lot of these films. A gem of a film is waiting to be found here. I just wish more directors would dream of making films of this nature, so I don't have to go months between discovering them.