Films, dreams and real life

What if a movie could dream?

Bernardo Bertolucci believes he has answered that surrealist question in his latest movie, “The Dreamers,” which opens Friday. It is about three film-loving students -- a naive American young man and a disconcertingly intimate French brother and sister -- who meet outside Paris’ Cinematheque Francaise during violent 1968 demonstrations protesting the dismissal of its director, Henri Langlois. Their relationship becomes a rule-breaking one as tumultuous as the politically rebellious times, and Bertolucci depicts it with enough graphic sexuality to earn the film an NC-17 rating.

But “The Dreamers” also operates on another level. It is a remembrance of films past as well as of times past. Bertolucci intertwines his narrative with scenes from a dozen or so old movies. These vintage clips serve to comment on his story, explain his characters’ motivations, or simply as a kind of free-association reverie.

“Let’s imagine a film has its own identity beyond the characters, the story, the plot,” Bertolucci says in a phone interview from London. “The clips in ‘The Dreamers’ are like the dreams of the film. It is like the film was dreaming.”

The movie’s first use of such a clip is a shock -- quite literally. The American student Matthew (Michael Pitt) goes to the Cinematheque to watch Samuel Fuller’s 1963 thriller “Shock Corridor” -- about a journalist trapped in a mental institution. He watches raptly, as do others in the audience, including Isabelle (Eva Green) and her twin brother Theo (Louis Garrel).

“I wanted to start with an American film because it is being seen by Matthew,” Bertolucci explains. “And I wanted one of those American films that probably was not so well-considered in the States but was discovered in France by Cahiers du Cinema and Positif and those [film] magazines. It was a way to say something about the character of Matthew. France used to be the strongest place for such passion for film.”

“The Dreamers’ ” characters watch another old film at the Cinematheque when, on a date, Matthew takes Isabelle to a screening of Frank Tashlin’s 1956 rock musical “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

Bertolucci, working with editor Jacopo Quadri, also inserts clips into the narrative. His characters like to act out movie scenes as if involved in a game of charades. And Bertolucci provides his audience with the answers, as when cutting between Isabelle prancing about her apartment with a feather duster and “Blonde Venus’ ” Marlene Dietrich dancing about in an ape costume. Another time, she enchants Matthew by touching objects in a bedroom of her parents’ apartment as he awakes -- as Greta Garbo does for John Gilbert in “Queen Christina.”

“In the future, in my memory, I shall spend a great deal of time in this room,” Garbo intones in the clip Bertolucci uses. The clips also can serve as a direct address from Bertolucci to us -- as when he shows bits of Buster Keaton’s “The Cameraman” and Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” while Matthew and Theo argue over which silent-film auteur was better.

“I personally had this discussion about Keaton or Chaplin many times,” Bertolucci recalls. “At the beginning I was for Keaton against Chaplin, then I switched over the years and now it’s impossible to choose between the two. But there was a kind of hormonal strength when I was young in being very fundamentalist, being completely, totally for one and against the other.”

While some clips used in “The Dreamers” were called for in the screenplay by Gilbert Adair, whose novel “The Holy Innocents” is the basis for the movie, several were Bertolucci’s idea. For instance, he decided to insert a scene from Robert Bresson’s wrenching 1967 “Mouchette” because he realized it matched a suicidal impulse of Isabelle’s.

And he thought to create a veritable call-and-response between Isabelle and “Breathless’ ” Jean Seberg, both shouting out “New York Herald Tribune.” (Seberg sells the newspaper in Paris in Jean-Luc Godard’s jump-cutting, 1959 New Wave classic.) “Breathless” has particular resonance for Bertolucci, the 63-year-old Italian-born director of the Oscar-winning “The Last Emperor.”

“I saw ‘Breathless’ in a [Paris] movie theater. It was a kind of enlightenment,” he says. “I was writing poems -- my father was a poet very much loved in Italy. It was when I started to think I wouldn’t be able to be as good as him, and that I needed to find my own way. Two movies changed my life: ‘Breathless’ and ‘La Dolce Vita.’ ” The latter, released in 1960, “was extraordinary,” he says. “It was when I thought, ‘I would love to do that.’ ”

Bertolucci also uses Godard’s 1964 “Band of Outsiders” to create a parallel construction, a mirroring of shots, as the youths of that film race through the Louvre while Matthew, Isabelle and Theo reenact the scene.

“I wrote him before shooting, saying, ‘Dear Jean-Luc, we haven’t seen each other for a long time but I would like to use a few seconds of “Breathless” and [“Band of Outsiders”] and already have permission from the owners of the rights, but would still like your permission,’ ” Bertolucci explains. “He wrote me back saying, ‘You can take what you want and remember: There are no author rights, only duties.’ ”