Passion in Paris

PARIS--After 30 years, Bernardo Bertolucci is filming here again. The last time, the film he made created an international scandal. “Last Tango in Paris,” starring Marlon Brando as a grieving, middle-aged man who meets a woman (Maria Schneider) in an empty apartment for bouts of anonymous, joyless sex, was a film of such astonishing sexual candor that it was condemned in the courts of Bertolucci’s native Italy as “obscene, indecent and catering to the lowest instincts of the libido.” He was tried for blasphemy (receiving a suspended sentence) and his right to vote was withdrawn for five years.

In terms of controversy, it’s a hard act to follow, but Bertolucci’s new film, “The Dreamers,” may yet emulate it. It is set in 1968, the year of “les evenements,” when street protests and strikes by workers and left-wing students briefly but memorably overturned the peaceful natural order of life in Paris and much of the rest of France. “This film has erotic content,” Bertolucci says. “It’s a part of the revolution of that era--being transgressive, and not in just the political sense.” But this time, apparently, it takes three to tango.

Much of “The Dreamers” is also set in an empty Paris apartment belonging to the parents of incestuous teenage twins. The siblings Theo and Isabelle (Louis Garrel and Eva Green) meet up with Matthew (Michael Pitt from “Murder by Numbers”), a sheltered young American studying in Paris. All three are ardent film buffs, and when the twins’ parents go on holiday, Matthew moves in, and the trio start playing mind games based on film trivia. These develop into psychological role-play, involving sexual forfeits.

“I had the idea of making a movie about Paris in 1968,” Bertolucci says. “But I wasn’t interested in historical reconstruction. What really intrigued me about that time were the young people, who were animated by enthusiasm, excitement and fantastic hope. It seemed then as if all young people felt it. Today, nobody has it. Ambitions today are much less noble and interesting.”

As it happened, the right book was waiting, ready for him to adapt. “The Holy Innocents,” by English author and ex-film critic Gilbert Adair, had been published in 1988, and Bertolucci and his longtime collaborator, British producer Jeremy Thomas, seized upon it as suitable for transfer to the big screen.

“Gilbert’s novel was not about the barricades and riots, but the magic meeting of three kids with the events of 1968 as a background,” Bertolucci says. “Often, speaking to kids who are children of people who were involved in those events, they know nothing. I think: ‘How is it possible? Your parents were there!’ But they didn’t say anything to their children. I think they have the feeling 1968 was a failure. It wasn’t at all. Life, behavior and a way of relating to each other socially went through incredible changes after 1968.”

He ponders all this, slumped in his air-conditioned trailer after an exhausting day of shooting in 95-degree heat. At 62, Bertolucci is one of world cinema’s elder statesmen; he walks painfully and slowly, having suffered a herniated disc two years ago. But he is still an elegant man with riveting presence and charisma.

The party line on set is that “The Dreamers” is not about those social and political events of 34 years ago, but primarily a story of a three-way relationship. Yet today’s scene re-creates a key moment in that fateful year in Paris, infamous among film buffs. It is taking place outside the city’s Cinematheque Francaise, where in the 1950s and 1960s young cineastes and New Wave filmmakers such as Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and Chabrol attended screenings of films with almost religious devotion. The government shut down the building in the spring of 1968.

French Culture Minister Andre Malraux had fired the Cinematheque’s co-founder and archivist Henri Langlois, but students, workers and film buffs took to the streets to rally to Langlois’ defense; police had to be called in. International pressure grew, dozens of film directors from across the world cabled their support for Langlois, and some of them threatened to withhold their films from being exhibited at the Cinematheque. Finally, the government caved in and reinstated Langlois.

“The Cinematheque was like a university, with Langlois showing all those people movies,” Bertolucci says. “Malraux’s excuse was that Langlois wasn’t saving or conserving films properly. There was a legend that he kept rare films at home in a bathtub and under the beds. Certainly he was unorthodox. But his attitude was to show those movies, not hide them.”

A few dozen extras and the three young lead actors cluster outside the doors of the real Cinematheque, reenacting the 1968 incident. They wear authentic period clothes--miniskirts, shirts with long, pointed collars--but the hues are more drab than most people recall.

For Adair, who is present on set, the scene is a re-creation of his own past. He was a Cinematheque habitue at the time.

“We were called ‘les rats’ [the rats], those of us who used to frequent it,” he recalls. “I was here at the Cinematheque, I participated in these demonstrations, and two months later, in May 1968, in the massive general strike. For me it’s not nostalgic, it’s a film about three kinds of utopia--social, sexual, cinematic. What we’re trying to capture here is that idealism. I lived incredibly intensely back then. I was a Maoist, for about three weeks. For a moment, I swear, I thought the world was going to change.”

“The Holy Innocents” seems unlikely source material, weighed down by Adair’s florid prose and heavy-handed movie-buff references. In fairness to him, he now feels embarrassed by it and will not even utter its title: “I was unhappy with it for many reasons,” he says.

But having written the script of “The Dreamers” (with strong input from Bertolucci), Adair is now rewriting “The Holy Innocents.” The new version of his book, also to be called “The Dreamers,” will be published when the film is released next year. “It’s a rare case, a novelist who’s writing his own novelization,” Adair says. “The new book won’t be exactly like the film, but closer to it.”

One thing certain about the new film is that it will be less extravagant than Bertolucci’s splashy, high-budget epics “The Last Emperor” (1987), “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha” (1993). The tenacious Jeremy Thomas raised the considerable finances for these films, shot in exotic, remote locations (mainland China, North Africa and Bhutan), without a penny from Hollywood.

For “The Dreamers,” Thomas found backers from Italy, Spain and Japan, as well as Fox Searchlight, the low-budget division of Fox Filmed Entertainment. It is budgeted at just under $15 million, modest by Bertolucci’s standards. “But it gives Bernardo everything he wants,” Thomas says. “He has 10 weeks to shoot, cranes, a top-level crew and three relatively new actors. Independent financing is never easy, but it wasn’t too hard raising the money with this. A lot of people still want to be involved with Bertolucci films.”

It’s easy to see why. Although his more recent films have been somewhat disappointing, his is one of the most distinguished bodies of work of any director in the last 40 years. And despite his physical pain, he has not lost his taste for filmmaking.

“We closed the Pont d’Iena to traffic first thing this morning to shoot a scene,” Bertolucci says of the bridge over the Seine River, with a wry twinkle. “People here assume I must be making an epic. But a lot of this film is a chamber piece--it’s three characters in an apartment.”

For Bertolucci, it is more. “The Dreamers” marks a return to the country that originally inspired him as a filmmaker, and it revisits an era in which he too was a committed leftist. “Paris was the city of cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s for me,” he says. “Back then, I had the feeling I was really a French director. I was in love with the nouvelle vague and its filmmakers.

“I made my first film at the age of 21, and did my first interview about it with an Italian journalist. I insisted on speaking French, and when he asked why, I told him ‘because French is the language of cinema.’ ” He chuckles at the memory: “My love for cinema was so violent, I was in a state of obsession. I loved [Godard’s] “A Bout de Souffle” and the films of Truffaut and Renoir.”

Although he was fascinated by the events of 1968 Paris, Bertolucci was elsewhere: “I was shooting my film ‘Partner’ in Rome, but every weekend the actor Pierre Clementi flew to Paris and came back with all the news and new slogans. It was like having an umbilical cord to what was happening here.”

He had sympathy for the workers and students who took to the streets of Paris but had philosophical differences. “In 1968 the students reached a position which I had reached years before, when I made ‘Before the Revolution’ [1964]. It opened here in Paris, and was a great success in the Latin Quarter and among young people, because it was a movie about what they were talking about.

“Personally, in 1968, I found those positions of extremism interesting but wrong. I had joined the Italian Communist Party, but in 1968 filmmakers like Godard and Marco Bellocchio were pro-Chinese or Marxist-Leninist. They considered me reformist.

“You remember those subtle differences. I had an admiration for the show of the Cultural Revolution. But I didn’t like that millions of people were shouting the same slogans. I liked that they had a book, not a gun. But it was the same book. I was suspicious about that unique voice.”

Bertolucci insists “The Dreamers” will be very different from “Last Tango in Paris.” “That was about devastating despair and infinite loneliness. It was very tragic. This is much lighter.”

He hopes “The Dreamers” will strike a chord with young audiences, especially the No Logo crowd, skeptical about consumerism and globalization.

“It will be interesting to see how kids of today relate to these three characters from 35 years ago--and how they view the life and the freedoms they enjoy today with the passion these children felt then.”