I've seen a few of Bernardo Bertolucci’s films--- The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor (1987). I was impressed. I haven't seen Before the Revolution (1965), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), and The Sheltering Sky (1990). 1900 (1976) was too truncated and Luna (1979) left me indifferent. From what I've seen it's an impressive body of work.

I watched The Dreamers (2004) on DVD the other night. It appears to be a nostalgia piece for the glory days of student activism in May 1968, and yet the film focuses on three particular protagonists, committed cinephiles who spend their days watching old films in the Cinémathèque Française; then, after it is closed down by the state, talking and arguing about films, vexing the relative merits of Keaton and Chaplin, and challenging each other to identify re-enactments of memorable scenes from their favorite movies.

It is a film about cinema as well as 1968 and reconciling individual desire with the desire of the people.

Yet the film also has a perverse and alienated air around the ménage à trois-- a sexual and fraternal frisson of personal middle class rebellion within a regressive cinephilic universe. They rarely leave the house for several weeks, and their isolated personal idyll and suicide attempt ends with a brick thrown through the apartment window during the May riots, and the twins embrace of direct action, street riots and violence.

Is the film is an old man’s exercise in nostalgia, thinking back to his youth in 1968, when idealism, sex, cinema and street protest were all that mattered? It is going back over old ground but it is not nostalgia. It is not '68 but an idea of it; or a dream of it? It is very referential in both a pop cultural (the Hendrix versus Eric Clapton discussion, Marilyn Monro in Delacroix's 'Liberty leading the People ' , The Grateful Dead's Dark Star etc) and cinematic sense.

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