The Dreamers

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

The film is adapted from Gilbert Adair's 1988 novel The Holy Innocents, which Adair himself rewrote for the screen at Bertolucci's request, retitling and substantially restructuring the original material. The cast pairs Michael Pitt — then in his early twenties, having broken through in Bully and Hedwig and the Angry Inch — with the French siblings Eva Green (in her screen debut) and Louis Garrel (the son of Philippe Garrel, in an early role); Garrel and Green would both go on to substantial European careers in the years following.

Cinematography is by Fabio Cianchetti and the soundtrack draws heavily on the Cinémathèque française programming that Henri Langlois ran during the film's setting period — including substantial archival material from Queen Christina, Top Hat, Shock Corridor, Mouchette and Breathless. The May 1968 student-revolt sequences were shot using extensive period footage cut into reconstructed material from the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The film is now widely cited as Bertolucci's late-career meditation on his own formation as a cinephile and a director.