It's a tough thing to be friends with Cinecultist. Sure, you get to hob nob with the glamour and the wit swirls around like so much magical detritus but there's no mere "let's go to the movies." There's nothing so simple when you're friends with the Cinecultist. A simple movie date with CC? Forgetaboutit.
CC had been wanting to catch The Dreamers for awhile now and Sunday afternoon seemed like a good time, a really lovely spring day in the Eee Vee. But is a NC-17 movie about cinephilia and Paris in May '68 really the best thing to watch on a first date? Of course not. All of this absurdity aside, CC did enjoy the film if only from the love of cinema surging from Bertollucci's movie. The reconstruction of famous movie scenes and the quotation are meant with such devotion, the Cinecultist can't help but be touched by this fellow feeling for the movies. Eva Green does even have a touch of the Anna Karina to her (so obviously implied by the threesome allusions to Band of Outsiders), and we were tickled to see Jean-Pierre Leaud reconstructing his famous speech before the Cinematheque Francais inter-cut with footage of him as a young man. That playing with time and commentary on the process of historical reconstruction was quite interesting.
But there is the lingering feeling that this is a weird weird movie. The way the characters react to things, so accepting of their anti-social tendencies and sexual anomalies, is completely unsettling to the point of nervous laughter. It's not that anything they did on screen was so shocking, but that they had no awareness within the narrative that their romantic intricacies aren't the end all be all. There is a tinge of Romance to this film, the belief that all of this emotion is truly epic, that seems to be too sincere to be accepted.
Posted by karen at March 3, 2004 8:09 AM