The Dreamers

By PETER CALDER

Herald rating: * * *

Cinema for cineastes, the 32nd film by Bertolucci is oddly shackled by its origins in the novel called The Holy Innocents by Scotsman Gilbert Adair. Its main character's inner life is revealed in several long expository voiceovers which hold us at arm's length from the other two members of its cinematic ménage à trois. The resulting detachment is ultimately fatal to the film's success: it is certainly clever, at times even remarkable (though never as subversive as it would like to think) but it remains almost completely uninvolving.

That main character is Matthew, a young Californian in Paris in 1968. He's a movie buff and spends most of his days at the Cinémathèque Francaise - the French film archive and museum. So he's there during a demonstration against the sacking of its head, Henri Langlois.

In the crowd he meets French twins Théo (Garrel) and Isabelle (Green) who invited him back to their upscale apartment. There they talk about politics and the movies and play a risque game of "name the movie" in which the forfeit for a wrong answer is, to say the least, highly charged.

Quite what develops in this erotic enclave is best not divulged although it's worth mentioning that it's depicted with unblinking candour. But Bertolucci (and Adair, who wrote the screenplay) are at least as interested in the emotional repercussions of the sexual hijinks as in the acts themselves.

The references are not simply cleverness for its own sake: this is a valentine to the cinema, or at least to cinephilia, but it's also a paean to the movies' power to fire the human imagination. Bertolucci lavishes the film with brief inserts from classics and New Wave landmarks, visually linking each clip with his own shot; the trio re-enacts the famous run through the Louvre from Godard's Outsiders; and most memorably in an early sequence he intercuts shots of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the young star of some of Truffaut's great 60s films, speaking in defence of Langlois in 1968 and re-enacting the speech.

But in the end that's all there is. In 1972, in Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci made one of the finest films of the century. But its power resided in its performances - the unsettling chemistry generated by the gruffly threatening Brando and the gamine, needy Maria Schneider. There's no mystery about what's going on here: what we see is what we get. Even the sex - doubtless risque in 1968 - looks tame now, which could never be said of the scene in Tango involving a pound of New Zealand butter.

CAST: Michael Pitt, Louis Garrel, Eva Green, Anna Chancellor, Robin Renucci

DIRECTOR: Bernardo Bertolucci

RUNNING TIME: 115 minutes

RATING: R18 Contains sex scenes.

SCREENING: Academy