The Dreamers

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers premiered out of competition at the 60th Venice Film Festival in 2003. It was his first feature in five years, after Besieged (1998), and in many ways an autobiographical companion to The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris: a return to the Paris cinephile world Bertolucci had inhabited himself as a young Italian writer-director in the late 1960s.

Gilbert Adair adapted it from his own 1988 novel The Holy Innocents, rewriting the book for the screen at Bertolucci's request and changing its title and much of its structure along the way. Michael Pitt, then in his early twenties and fresh from Bully and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, plays the American. The French siblings are Eva Green, in her screen debut, and Louis Garrel, son of Philippe Garrel, in an early role; both went on to substantial European careers.

Fabio Cianchetti shot it, and the soundtrack leans heavily on the Cinémathèque française programming Henri Langlois ran in the years the film is set, with generous archival extracts from Queen Christina, Top Hat, Shock Corridor, Mouchette and Breathless. The May 1968 street sequences cut period footage into material reconstructed on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Seen now, it plays as Bertolucci's late-career meditation on how he became a cinephile, and then a director.