Bertolucci doesn’t like to beat around the bush: In The Dreamers he gets anti-Oedipal on our ass with softcore conviction. You might ask, do we really need more horny, ageing Eurateurs flouting viagra prescriptions in the name of bird-flipping American puritanism?

Bertolucci does have more on his mind than an unchained ode to cosmopolitanism, but I wouldn’t blame you for not noticing: Pull back the curtain far enough on this mess of struggling limbs, and you may divine some fleeting taste of nostalgia’s transparency. Otherwise, it comes off like a badly-scripted Vanity Fair photo shoot, all manners of time and space compressed into an unwavering, surface-level decadence. Berotucci plays along, and gets caught up in his own clammy, hamfisted scopophilia (watch how tightly the camera clings to Green’s body the first time she undresses). Left practically unchecked, tongue-wagging like this makes it hard to swallow the futility-of-experiencing-the-world-through-images-alone bullshit, a tactic that only becomes moving when an attempted date turns into a simulacrum of one, trapping the two lovers like moths in projector-light. But psychological opacity quickly dwindles into obtusity, as the three leads mingle bridle-eyed wonder with sexual facility in a way that’s just creepy. Red, white and blue may be the order of the day, but I’ll take mine star-spangled, thank you every much.—David Levinson

» Bernardo Berolucci | Italy/France/UK | 2003