The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

Bertolucci has been in unofficial retirement since this, and it would be a pity for a sporadically grandiloquent directorial career to fizzle out in this way. Yet it would also be entirely apposite as a summary of his arc: The Dreamers recycles the themes he was making his name on in his heyday, after which returns have been diminishing. Sexual tension and bohemian non-conformism in particular loom large, immediately bringing Last Tango in Paris to mind, even without the identikit setting, and not much is added by forcing the preoccupations into the structural mould of Melville/Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles.
Just as in Les Enfants, spoilt young siblings play out an incestuous relationship of infantile power games into which a selected innocent outsider is admitted to play a pawn's part rather than serve as a release from their stifling mutual interdependence. The explicit sexual experimentation of Last Tango is then daubed over this framework.
The main saving grace of the film, the one that makes considerable amends for the plundering of even entire scenes from the former films, is the distance that an older Bertolucci puts between his protagonists and our sympathies. The self-obsessed youths are cocooned from the radicalism of the Paris of 1968, spending their days in a dreamland of masturbatory film debate, and this bubble will be burst. It's just that Bertolucci also neglected to give them enough redeeming qualities to make us care either way.

5/10