THE DREAMERS

Paris in the Spring of 1968: the city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and a spirit of social and political revolution is in the air. Yet Théo (Louis Garrel), his twin sister Isabelle (Eva Green) and Matthew (Michael Pitt), an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.

Denied their nightly fix when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed world of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

“THE DREAMERS, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence. The idea that living in and through movies is not a solitary neurosis but a mode of communion is made gloriously literal.” - A.O. Scott

“Being alive with a capital 'A', and having the time and space to be in love with art before life sucks the wind out of you.” - Neil Bahadur