THE DREAMERS (2003) - Our Godard and Savior

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Bernardo Bertolucci’s 'The Dreamers' (2003). Known for his “hot house” cinema, in which characters are crammed into isolated intimate spaces until they burst, Bertolucci returns again to offer up a claustrophobic yet sprawling visual love letter to his own memories of the French New wave —albeit through a lens of decadence, incest, and as many Jean Luc Godard references as one can still stuff into such an already compact space. Based on Gilbert Adair’s 1988 novel ‘The Holy Innocents’, which itself is an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel ‘Les Enfants Terribles’ (The Holy Terrors), The Dreamers purposefully positions itself in a curious temporal space — one in which the continuous creative power of sex and cinema are the only realities worth living for. There’s also just a lot of twincest.

Topics include: Adair’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau for his own 1988 novel, as well as his tweaks when adapting his own work for The Dreamers screen play; The 1968 Parisian student riots; The French New Wave Movement; Auteur theory (and the cinema of Nicholas Ray); The incorporated collage of film references; Bertolucci’s seeming obsession with Jean Luc Godard; the protest-inspiring film archival and preservation efforts of Henri Langlois; the retrospective dark cloud Bertolucci’s past casts on the film today; and what esoteric reference this movie and Joel Schumacher’s 1997 ‘Batman and Robin’ have in common.

Episode Safeword: “vanilla”