Mikhail Vizel. Tina and libertina

Tina and libertina
Mikhail Vizel

Publication date: March 31, 2004

The funniest opinion I heard about “Dreamers” was this: a touching film, with the right music, but, oh, if only it had been made not by these smug Europeans, but by a normal American director with a strong American producer, some Scorsese and Weinstein ! What a great love story they would have made - after, of course, they would have thrown out all these tedious arguments and ridiculous politics!

This opinion is not entirely without foundation, but it is clearly unjustified. First of all, let Scorsese and Weinstein glorify their New York thugs and faithful slave owners and let the Europeans bury their beautiful dead themselves. And secondly, Americanizing “Dreamers” is completely unnecessary. They are already Americanized to no end.

How? Very simple. This is described by Teffi . “Awakened by this whisper, I ran out into the garden in a hood of silver brocade, covered like a cloak by my flowing hair (my braid had grown a lot during this time, by God), and the count embraced me in his arms...” - a 15-year-old high school student writes a letter from her dacha to a friend in the city.

Matthew, the hero of Michael Pitt, is the same condensed dream of himself - romantically beautiful, only not of a Russian schoolgirl, but of a boy from the American outback: Paris, the mythical May of '68, an old apartment with a huge library, a joint of marijuana in a cast-iron bathtub near Joplin , Morrison and other good old Americans (neither the Beatles nor the Stones seem to exist), rich intellectual conversations (I learned to speak French very well, by God), and most importantly, of course, a dazzlingly beautiful intellectual who takes holds your hand and begins a passionate affair with you.

Laughing at teenage dreams, of course, is a sin, but this is painfully reminiscent of The Barber of Siberia , where an aging Moscow actress and a prison guard in Butyrka speak equally easily in English - so that it would be more convenient for the same American teenager to feel and be transported. Hence the clumsy “Non, je ne regrette rien” at the end.

By the way, a funny paradox: the American teenager in the film turns out to be more reasonable, politically and psychoanalytically savvy and even, if you like, more cynical than his French friends - patented Parisian libertines. Matthew is mad - but just to the extent that later, at home, he would not be ashamed to talk about the “French madness” to his envious friends and companions.

And here the second bottom of Bertolucci’s film-dream begins to reveal itself. Is the director mocking his American audience, who dreams of being transported to Paris in 1968? Doesn’t it become a little strange when it turns out that the American boy (at first somewhat similar to the hero of “Cabaret” - a naive American in the Berlin sodom of the 30s) clearly already has sexual experience, and his Parisian “seductress” is losing her virginity with him? Who, exactly, is “teaching bad things” to whom?

Bertolucci saved his greatest subtlety almost for the very end. The characters endlessly play with quotes from old American films and don’t notice how they themselves are almost exactly acting out the most dramatic quote: from the most appropriate “Theorem” - a stunning masterpiece by Pier Paolo Pasolini ( Bertolucci’s mentor . “Theorem” came out on screens just in that very year 68. (I don’t say what kind of scene this is and what this quote is - so as not to spoil the possible pleasure for those who have not yet watched it).

Movie quotes are only one of two important components of a film. The second component is musical quotes. The film really does have exceptionally correct music. Bertolucci is the same age as Lennon . It is no wonder that he was able to convey on what two pillars the worldview of several generations of European youth once stood. Moreover, the first of them was precisely the generation that was depicted in “Dreamers”. And isn’t this very name an allusion to Lennon’s most famous song? ( You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one... )

However, this “disintegration of the atom” can continue for a long time. Because, thank God, the film still remained European. And it is almost impossible to distinguish where in it there are real quotes, allusions and summing up, and where it is just a dream that only appeared for a moment to eyes tired of looking at ancient paintings for a long time.