Cinema lies at the heart of this film, not politics. The three central characters are film buffs and regularly attend screenings at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. The twins, Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), lounge on the front row, while Matthew (Michael Pitt), the American student, sits a little further back. It’s during a protest at the Cinémathèque that Matthew finally meets them, though their meeting is interrupted by the charging of the riot police.

Matthew is immediately drawn into their world. The twins seem to ooze sophistication. They invite him to dinner at their apartment where he meets their English mother and poet-intellectual father. But the parents are about to leave Paris for a month, and Matthew is invited to move into the apartment.

Theo tells Matthew that he and Isabelle are Siamese twins, joined in the mind. Matthew, naturally, does not believe him, though later he does. Apart from their emotional union, they also have matching marks on their upper arms. He very quickly finds that the siblings are engaged in an erotic attachment with one another. Invited into their world, he soon ends up with Isabelle, but Theo is never far away. Though there is an implied erotic link between the two boys, it’s never developed in the film as it is in the book. Isabelle is therefore the central link.

Obsessed with cinema, the trio act out scenes from classic films, while the others have to guess the film. If they don’t, they have to do a forfeit. These forfeits are inevitably of a sexual nature, and it’s in this way that Matthew is drawn into their erotic world. Music from the period - Hendrix, Janice Joplin, and others - plays through the film, but the theme tune from Godard’s ‘Breathless’ also plays from time to time. In fact, shortly after meeting Matthew, Isabelle claims that she was born in 1959, on the Champs Élysées, and starts to call out Jean Seberg’s lines when Seberg first appears selling the New York Herald Tribune. The scene then shifts to Godard’s black and white footage. Later, clips featuring Garbo, Dietrich, Fred Astaire, and others appear. The trio also perform Godard’s ‘Bande À Part’ race through the Louvre, attempting to break the record quoted in the original film, which they do. It’s here that a clip from Todd Browning’s ‘Freaks’ appears, as the twins pronounce Matthew ‘one of us.’

While the three characters are cooped up in the apartment, outside in the streets of Paris, the rubbish hasn’t been collected for weeks, and demonstrators are out on the streets. But Theo, Isabelle and Matthew only catch glimpses of this. It’s only when Matthew tries to separate Isabelle from Theo, to get her out on a date, that they come face to face with the demos on TV screens inside shop windows, and the mountains of rubbish collecting in the streets. Towards the end of the film, outside events break through, quite literally, when a brick comes through their window. This brick changes the characters’ fates. The film ends on street fighting and the riot police closing in. The dream is over, not just for the characters inside the apartment, but also for the idealists behind the revolts, whose attempts to change the world fell short of the sweeping changes hoped for.

‘The Dreamers’ is a very stylish film, and the three main actors are entirely believable in their roles. As well as referencing films, it also looks back to Cocteau’s novel ‘Les Enfants terribles.’ Although the film has been marketed as sexually explicit, it’s more a matter of explicit nudity. Bertolucci wanted the young actors to feel they could walk around naked as though dressed up. There are times when the film seems too self-consciously stylish. But the enclosed world of the characters, their separation from the city outside, their constant referencing of films, offsets this. There could be a case made for cultural stereotyping - both in the case of the French characters and the American. Overall, though, it’s well worth watching, and the DVD extras include a commentary from screenwriter and novelist Gilbert Adair and Bertolucci himself, as well as a short feature about the events in France in May 1968. There’s also a ‘Making of The Dreamers’ documentary, and a music video included.