Sex without porn

The Dreamers is perhaps the sweetest, most wholesome movie about sex, drugs, revolution, rioting, rock and roll, and le cinema, ever rated NC-17. As disparate as that sounds, it's somehow an appropriate mixture for a film that, at its pink, quivering center, is about the sexual awakening of a dopey and na‹ve American cinephile and his French compatriots, equally young and awkward underneath their studied cool.

Upon fleeing his home in California to study in Paris for a year, Matthew (Michael Pitt) finds himself sitting in the front row of the Cinematheque Francais, day after day, instead of in a classroom. A true film buff, he knows by heart every Godard, Truffuat, and Chaplin movie that graces the screen. He has competition in Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) though, Parisian siblings whom he meets protesting the expulsion of the Cinematheque's founder and director, Henri Langlois, by the French cultural minister. The three quickly bond and, after racing through the Louvre in a reenactment of a similar scene in Godard's Band of Outsiders, Theo and Isabelle take Matthew into their home and adopt him as another member of their family.

All of this is set amidst the May 1968 student rebellions. Disgruntled with the cultural and political climate at the time, students, along with factory workers, took to the streets to overturn cars, graffiti slogans like "Never work!" on monuments, and throw fire-bombs at intervening police officers. The riots culminated with the construction of huge barricades in Paris' student-dominated Latin Quarter, where the protestors planned to cut themselves off from the city proper and live in a utopian world of their own devising.

Although the action of the May '68 riots remains on the periphery of the film until its end, director Bernardo Bertolucci and writer Gilbert Adair draw parallels between the chaos of the streets and the seemingly sedate setting of Theo and Isabelle's apartment. With the authority figures out of town, the kids are living their own adolescent utopia -- having lots of sex and getting drunk.

It's the sex that earned The Dreamers an NC-17 rating. The three leads are naked throughout most of the third act and Bertolucci certainly isn't shy about showing them so. When Matthew and Isabelle have sex for the first time the camera lingers on their coiled forms for what seems like an interminably long time, especially by contemporary standards where the rule for portraying sex usually involves cutting away at the last possible moment to an oil-derrick or a train rushing into a tunnel.

While Bertolucci's unabashed portrayal of young love saves the film from being exploitive or pornographic, at the same time the characters' love-making never seems distant or cold. It's a delicate balancing act and one Bertolucci should be commended for pulling off, considering how many other directors have hopelessly fumbled through their sex scenes like adolescent schoolboys trying to unhook their first bra.

The Dreamers' childlike fascination with all things carnal is reflected in the characters' own innocence on the subject. For Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle there's no difference between the films and music they worship and their sexual liaisons; both are an escape from the responsibility and reality of the adult world.

For Theo, the student revolts serve a similar purpose. Theo has a Mao poster, a kitschy Mao desk-lamp, and the requisite Marxist pamphlets, but when it comes to attending a protest or taking to the streets, the young Parisian is hopelessly impotent as a party member. It takes a brick, inadvertently launched through the apartment's window, for the film's protagonists to even take note of the rioting in front of their building.

The brick comes at the height of the characters' regression into adolescence. At this point in the film, Matthew, Theo, and Isabelle have built a blanket fort in the middle of their living room and, after getting drunk on their parents' most expensive wine, sleep naked in the fort, wrapped innocently in each other's arms. The brick is, in fact, one of the worst things that could have happened to Bertolucci's film, precipitating the movie's shift from an endearing Peter Pan-like quality where children remain young and irresponsible at all costs, to a Lord of the Flies narrative, where child-like decisions have real, often violent, consequences.

The Dreamers ends on its weakest and most confusing note. Theo and Isabelle run to the front of the barricades to chuck Molotov cocktails at the cops while Matthew, exhorting everyone to "just get along!" turns away and dissolves into the crowd. What's unclear here is just what Bertolucci and Adair are trying to say about the revolution. Who remains a child and who manages to grow up?