Author’s Note: I am now offering my services on Fiverr. I will beta read your poem(s) and short stories for a series of escalating fees.
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As a fan of French films, I had heard of The Dreamers somewhere along the grapevine; though it always passed me by. Thanks to my MUBI subscription, I was able to watch it beneath a blanket on a mild Saturday evening.
The film is based on the 1988 novel The Holy Innocents, which is subsequently inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfant Terribles (1929). Both novels feature siblings who are unusually close; both exploring perversion. In The Dreamers, we follow American exchange student Matthew (Michael Pitt) as he protests the firing of a director of the Cinémathèque française. There he meets maverick siblings Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). What follows is an astounding portrait of disillusioned youth in 1960’s Paris.
When Théo and Isabelle’s parents go on a trip to the country, the troublesome trio purposefully isolate themselves from the outside world during a time of uprisings and great uncertainty. This can be witnessed in the scene where Matthew and their father seemingly go head to head at the kitchen table:
‘A petition is a poem; a poem is a petition.’
Film buffs, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew recreate many scenes from cinema; such as the Louvre scene in Jean-Luc Goddard’s Bande à part. They quiz each other on their film knowledge, raising the stakes every time. Such forfeits often include a kind of sexual humiliation. We must ask ourselves what the purpose of this is? Why must they hide from society just to degrade themselves? Perhaps they feel society has become so rotten that they can only but take it out on one another.
When Matthew asks Isabelle what she would do if her parents found out about her relationship with her brother, she tells him that she would kill herself. She tries to make good on this when her parents unexpectedly return from their trip to find all three completely naked. Not wanting to disturb them, their mother leaves a check. Upon waking to discover that her parents have returned, Isabelle fiddles with the gas and holds a hose to her face in order to do what she said. But this is disturbed when a brick comes flying through the window, or as she puts it, “The street came flying into the room”. I believe this scene to be the very core of the film. The barriers they forged have been perforated by reality.
The final scene of the film sees the trio enter the chaos. At first they chant, but when Théo joins a group of protesters making molotov cocktails, Matthew admonishes him, “This is what they do. This is not what we do,” which is again a key factor of the film. Defeated, Matthew turns his back on the siblings and glumly retreats. The final shot shows the gendarmerie charge towards the mob; underscored by Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien.
While watching The Dreamers I was immediately reminded of Georges Bataille’s novella, Story of the Eye. The book follows an unnamed narrator who begins a sexual relationship with his cousin Simone after she accepts his dare to place her bare bottom in a saucer of milk. Eventually they involve their friend Marcelle in the activities, but this causes her to have a breakdown. However, these aren’t the only parallels. As Isabelle and Matthew have sex on the lino, Théo cracks a few eggs in a pan.
Eggs feature prominently in Bataille’s novella; often symbolic of eyes. The use of them in this particular scene is what first reminded me of Story of the Eye. As a piece of literature, it is often written off as purely pornographic, but the sex is merely a vehicle for something greater. Georges Bataille believed sex and death are interconnected as detailed in his work of non-fiction, Erotism: Death and Sensuality. And death is present; not only in the scene where Isabelle tries to commit suicide, but in the death of childhood innocence. Théo and Isabelle have been wrapped in their idea for a long time and Matthew comes to act as a scythe chopping off a head. The best example of this is when they try to shave his pubic hair and he says:
‘Want me to be a little boy for you? A pre-pubescent Théo at six who you can play games with and you can touch pee-pee.’
Following this, Matthew takes Isabelle out on a date without her brother. But when they return, they discover that Théo is with another woman. This eventually upsets Isabelle and she turns on Matthew: asking who he is. As she screams and bangs on the door, the music is turned up. His crestfallen look could be used to argue that he is the embodiment of adulthood. The siblings’ growing resentment towards Matthew’s outlook increases when Théo chokes him. ‘You speak too much,” he says.
What makes The Dreamers so mesmerising isn’t just the colours, film inserts, or the Parisian background; but the themes which it explores. It is unapologetic in its sexual explorations (which are very graphic). When life is so uncertain in our current climate, the stories of Matthew, Isabelle and Théo don’t seem all that different. People can often be quite prudish and puritanical about sex on screen, but there would be no film without those scenes. And if we include the parallels between Bataille’s Story of the Eye, we come closer to unsheathing the soul of The Dreamers; the motherboard.
Courtenay's Corner 