The Dreamers - Gilbert Adair

THE DREAMERS – GILBERT ADAIR

It's fairly easy to see why a film director of such standing as Bernardo Bertolucci would want to make a film of Gilbert Adair's novel, The Dreamers. Essentially it's a story about cinema, full of cinematic images and allusions to classic scenes from cinematic history that is bound to appeal to any cinephile. Moreover, it's about the blurring of the lines between reality and the silverscreen, set in Paris of 1968 and the revolutionary events that took place during that year. It was practically begging to be filmed.

The story concerns a French brother and sister by the names of Theo and Isabelle who befriend a fellow student, an American called Matthew. Their friendship with Matthew, however, is based solely around their shared love of films and when the cinema they attend is suddenly closed down by the government they are cast adrift with seemingly nothing further to hold their friendship together.

With no cinema to attend, they hatch the idea to instead re-enact a scene from one of their most favourite of movies, Jean-Luc Godard's 'Band a Part', in which the characters race through the Louvre in an endeavour to break the record for viewing the museum's collection of treasures in as short a time as possible. If films can no longer be screened at the cinema, they decide, then they will take them into the streets and into the Louvre itself.

Except they don't. Whilst their Louvre escapade is very successful and they do indeed break the record, rather than remaining on the streets they retreat instead to the empty confines of their parent's apartment where they mimic, quote from and act out various scenes from films as a continuous, rolling game of charades. They introduce forfeits and penalties to pay when failing to correctly guess what film they are each alluding to, the forfeits rapidly escalating into being ever more outrageous.

The brother is made to masturbate in front of the other two, Matthew has sex with the sister, the brother has sex with Matthew, then they all end up having continuous sex with each other. Come the end, having dispensed with wearing clothes altogether and caked in vomit, faeces and semen, they have cast off all vestiges of respectability and become ignoble savages eating cat food from tins.

A stone thrown from the street smashes through their window and their hermetically-sealed world is suddenly interrupted. On stepping outside the apartment they walk straight into a full-blown riot where barricades have been erected and police in gas masks are doing battle with students waving red flags. Paris is in flames and the revolution has begun.

Though it's a work of fiction, a large amount of Gilbert Adair's book is based on real events. Apart from all the film references, Adair also mentions such luminaries as Michael Foucault, François Truffaut, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and importantly, Henri Langlois, the curator of the Cinematheque Francais, the very cinema from which the students have been cast adrift from.

Referred to by Jean Cocteau once as 'the dragon who guards our treasure', Henri Langlois was an eccentric French legend who during the war had rescued film prints in the same way others had rescued Jews. In 1968 there was indeed a bitter fall-out between him and the French Minister of Culture leading to the closure of Langlois's cinema. This in turn led to protests calling for the reinstatement of Langlois and the reopening of the cinema, these protests being a precursor for the May '68 mass protests a little later.

The only problem with Adair's book if indeed it can even be called a problem, is that its meaning and message isn't particularly clear – if indeed there is even a meaning and a message to it? A lot depends on the point of view of the individual reader and where they're coming from politically, it would seem. For instance, if you think of the May '68 events as being a terrible thing and the likes of Daniel Cohn-Bendit as being nothing but cheerleaders for destruction then the goings-on within the apartment between the three students can be read as a reflection of those events but on a more miniature scale.

However, if you think of May '68 in the positive and the likes of Cohn-Bendit as cheerleaders for social liberation, then what occurs in the apartment is total personal liberation and a freeing from all the moral constraints of so-called civilised society. Not that incest and eating cat food has got anything to do with revolution, it should be said.

Or perhaps Adair's book is an indictment of bourgeois society and the three students are a representation of that society, gorging itself to death in splendid isolation on a diet of decadence and perversity while outside on the streets the proletariat are fighting for a better world? An echo of the current situation in France with the gilets jaunes/yellow vests perhaps? Who knows?

At the end of the day it's probably a fruitless task trying to read too much into The Dreamers and it should instead be just taken for what it actually is. And that is exactly? Entertainment, of course. Of the kind you might also derive from the cinema. Interesting, somewhat unique, culturally poignant entertainment but entertainment all the same. And that's enough for any half-decent book.

John Serpico