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Bernado Bertolucci loves cinema. If you don’t believe me, then see The Dreamers. It’s a light, wonderful love letter to cinema which, for many, is wrapped up with the French New Wave and the reaction of French critics to American films. It’s a simple story of a Matthew, a young American cinephile who meets Isabel and Theo and falls in love. Part of the film is a love letter and a lot of the film is a exploration of youth and sexuality. Setting the film in Paris in Spring of 1968 makes it possible to explore all sorts of ideas about when film became a more self-conscious art. But it’s not a didactic film and it’s not boring. It captures the feeling of falling in love with the flickering images on the screen and the feeling that you’re seeing a whole new world for the first time. Maybe I’m biased, but meeting a scarily beautiful uninhibited woman who only wants to talk about films, see films, reenact scenes from films and have sex is probably a fantasy shared by many cinephiles. But Bertolucci makes it more than a tawdry fantasy and manages to combine the sensual, the cinematic and the political in a Brechtian mix that never seems heavy. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I loved it.
