Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film The Dreamers, currently playing at the Lagoon in Uptown, can safely be summed up as the director’s love letter to cinephilia. Gorgeously shot and filled with references to classic films (in the form of both discussions and directly-inserted movie clips that function like poetry citations in literature), it is unabashed in its own movie love and sensitive to the aesthetic passions of its protagonists.

It is a must-see for anyone who takes the arts seriously and desires to have his or her seriousness validated in characters portrayed as active and intelligent rather than isolated and cultish; it is also highly recommended to anyone interested in taking a crash course in the history of French film appreciation. It’s unfortunate that this sexy and accessible film has been marketed as an art movie, given the number of mainstream films that validate taking sports or war seriously. While its account of the Paris uprisings of 1968 is fairly simple, it is remarkable nonetheless that The Dreamers practically takes for granted the links (in both ideology and participants) between that era’s communities of movie lovers and student revolutionaries.

Superficially, the film appears more concerned with the former group than the latter only until the very end, when Bertolucci finally brings out the tear gas and Molotov cocktails. Yet the rest of the movie is keen to the ideals of liberation and fraternity. Matthew (Michael Pitt), the hero, is an American student living in 1968 Paris who finds camaraderie and sexual awakening with French twin siblings Theo and Isabelle (Louis Garrel and Eva Green). The three meet at the legendary Cinematheque Francaise as the theater is being closed down due to protests (staged in response to the ousting of Cinematheque founder Henri Langlois, and Bertolucci suggests that they grow to incite the entire student revolt). Walking along the Seine one night, they discover a common sensibility and love of movie history, and within days the twins have invited Matthew to move in with them and join in their games of sexual exhibitionism.

Sexuality becomes a focal point in The Dreamers, fusing with the other major themes of innocence and revolution and ultimately shaping the movie’s conception of each. Bertolucci seems most comfortable in confronting this subject than he does any other of the film (which isn’t especially surprising, since he is also the director of Last Tango in Paris, one of the raciest movies of the early 1970s); the ease with which he presents the developing intimacy of his young characters may the most radical thing about it. The film is one of the few big-studio productions of which I am aware that considers sensitively (and not with prurience or revulsion) what it means to come or menstruate in front of another person, and how this heightens personal relationships. It is also aware of the ways in which sex leads naturally to confession and revelation. Apart from his initial tryst with Isabelle (who becomes his lover), Matthew’s biggest moment arrives during a scene in which he takes a bath and smokes pot with the siblings: “Why is it that I’m always looking for people to love me?” he asks before falling asleep on Isabelle’s shoulder.

Pitt (who Bertolucci and cinematographer Fabian Cianchetti immortalize by making his the most beautifully-lit cock in movie history) has a beautiful, sympathetic presence, something that shone through the voyeuristic impulses of Larry Clark’s Bully. In a sense, The Dreamers could be described as the anti-Clark movie, since it regards the sexuality of its innocents as beautiful and inherently constructive. In one late scene, for instance, Isabelle poses semi-nude as the Venus de Milo, using her sexuality to replicate art, before approaching Matthew.

Though I wouldn’t accuse Bertolucci of exploiting his actors, I would argue that the director’s pervasive eroticism ends up working against some of their less obvious talents. In using his stars’ bodies to convey Youth, Innocence and Discovery, Bertolucci tends to limit characterization, history and the passion for cinema––in short, everything that cannot be consumed by metaphor. As the three heroes retreat to their lavish apartment and sexual escapades, the outside world becomes a haze for them, and Bertolucci inadvertently seems to mimic their shortsightedness.

One of Matthew and Theo’s early discussions about film concerns the splendors of Nicholas Ray’s work, and later Theo expounds on how Maoism is inherently cinematic. Both conversations could be taken from the pages of Cahiers du cinema, the groundbreaking French film journal that launched the careers of directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut; however, they reflect distinctly different eras of the journal and, by extension, French film culture. Cahiers was at the peak of its obsession with Ray in the mid to late ‘50s, while Mao did not become a celebrity in its pages until the late ‘60s.

This seems like the stickling of a cinephile, though it is only a variant on similar critiques of any historical fiction in which a sense of history is compressed at the expense of generalization. Ordinarily this is not a major problem, yet The Dreamers purports to capture a single month of history; by condensing the development of an entire era into the narrative, the film imparts a greater sense of confusion than even its setting would require. Bertolucci is more successful at establishing the period imagistically. The film’s set design is rich without turning 1968 into a museum piece, thus evoking a more palpable nostalgia and sense of innocence than the scenic overkill of Francis Ford Coppola’s films (The Godfather in particular).

Again, I arrive at Innocence. It’s odd, engaging with a work about youth created by a much older man. The question that always emerges is, Who is the better authority: Bertolucci, who has had decades to meditate on the subject, or me, who is currently experiencing it? In spite of our mutual interests, I admit that I had trouble identifying with Bertolucci’s dreamers, who emerge as symbols as much as characters. Yet we don’t go to the movies simply to identify with people who are like us (a point that the film is keen to point out in the characters’ healthy adulation of mythic figures like Keaton and Chaplin), and as Armond White has noted in his writings on Eric Rohmer, there are some truths about being 21 that can be discovered only by living to be 41.

Bertolucci, who is now 63, made his first feature film Before the Revolution at the age of 22. Since then, he has frequently returned to the theme of youth and has passionately defended the works of younger filmmakers (notably Harmony Korine’s Gummo, made when that director was 23, and which Bertolucci lauded as one of the only revolutionary films of the past few decades). I am touched that a master filmmaker has such sympathy for my peers and the progressive lineage of which he considers us a part. This would explain my guilt, then, in writing that The Dreamers captures the lyricism of youth but not its music. For all the film’s attention to its characters’ hopes and bodies, their insecurities––both emotional and physical––are rendered only superficially.

Insecurity is just as integral to being young as longing or inspiration, and this is especially true when one chooses to supplant a conventional social life with the world of aesthetics. To be fair, The Dreamers is well aware of this: Theo and Isabelle’s near-incestuous bond reinforces the private, almost guilty passion of compulsive movie-going. Yet the inescapably un-glamorous insecurity that defines these maiden aesthetic pursuits, if not most coming-of-age experiences, is glossed over by Bertolucci’s impeccable craft. Missing is the uncomfortable body language plainly evident in Gummo, the late work of Robert Bresson (one of The Dreamers’ references) or myself.

I refer to myself here not out of egoism or comic relief, but in an attempt to rationalize with The Dreamers in the manner most appropriate to the film. Searching out meaning in the arts is a vital experience indeed, and the process becomes complete when we allow these meanings to interact with our own values and experiences. Bertolucci’s nostalgia and Cliff’s Notes history suggest (a bit unfairly, I’d argue) that this kind of edification is a thing of the past, yet he renders it with such color and emotion that the argument for its revival becomes near-impossible to refute.