Tears before bedtime

Gilbert Adair was for many years the most elegant and perceptive of British film critics: an unashamed cinephile, enamoured of the art form in the same way that his prose appeared to be in love with its own expressiveness. Adair has now adapted his own 1988 novel, The Holy Dreamers, for the screen; while he was at it he also turned his screenplay back into prose and has reissued the transformed novel. Enter Bernardo Bertolucci, who, like Adair, was in Paris during the 1960s and also caught up in Les Evénements that form the backdrop for this claustrophobic tale of sexual shenanigans and adolescent acting out.

Perhaps it is unfair to accuse a film director of being a buff, but Bertolucci's own oeuvre has smeared, like Vaseline, across the medium, in such a way as to obscure the distinction between triumphant auteur and enthusiastic amateur. The chilly brilliance of The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem has been swamped by the teary bathos of La Luna and The Sheltering Sky; while the ponderous scope of 1900 and The Last Emperor can shrink to the myopic voyeurism of Last Tango in Paris and Stealing Beauty. Of all the great directors to have emerged in postwar Italy, Bertolucci is perhaps the most perplexing and unfulfilled, his later films mostly expressing the manner of greatness rather than its substance.

For Bertolluci and Adair to collaborate on a chamber piece that depicts an erotic triangle of cinephiles whiling away the spring of 1968 in a Parisian apartment as the revolution stutters to a halt in the boulevards without, smacks of a busman's holiday on an epic scale. A film about film-obsessives isn't any more intrinsically interesting to cinema-goers than a novel about literary types is to its readers.

Isabelle and Théo are beautiful 19-year-old twins who haunt the Cinémathèque Française, an eccentric venue actually within the Ministry of Culture. When the cinema's director, Henri Langlois, is dismissed by the government, the buffs are locked out. Falling in with Matthew, a precocious American putti (cherub), the pair retreat to their - conveniently absent - parents' luxurious and bohemian home, where they pose each other demanding film trivia questions and pay forfeits in the form of sexual displays. As events in the streets heat up, so do the jealousies and tensions between the three dreamers. Will Matthew seduce Isabelle away from her incestuous relationship with her brother? Will Théo turn his Maoist rhetoric into Molotov cocktails? Will Isabelle's fervid nature ignite into insanity?

Bertolucci's 1968 Paris - from what we see of it - looks beautiful. The students are all fashionpl ate manqué s , flying down the cobbled streets of the Rive Gauche on the run from the stylists of History, while Hendrix, Dylan and Joplin provide the soundtrack. The riot police look great as well, in their ankle-length leather coats and black ties - you can rely on the French to make civil disorder comme il faut.

Fabio Cianchetti's photography captures the aqueous green light of the city, tweaked into bright pastels by the sunshine, then muted into sepias and browns for the crepuscular interior sequences. The actors look lovely as well, all fine young specimens that it is a pleasure to contemplate in the nude, or when playing dressingup games. When Matthew (played by Michael Pitt), penetrates Isabelle (Eva Green) for the first time under Théo's (Louis Garrel) avid gaze, the dusting of pimples in the cleft of his buttocks is an earthy counterpoint to these bright young things' ethereal beauty.

Still, there is more to a good sex scene than colonoscopy, and to give Bertolucci his due he does shoot a good sex scene; these bodies are at once solid and fluid, poised and abandoned. Isabelle compares film to "spying on parents making love", but I suppose the queer thing about this one is that the director and the screenwriter are parents spying on the children they never had making love.

Still, I could have done with a great deal more sex, because, although Adair's script is fluent and credible, young people'sblether about revolution, philosophy and film remains exactly the same whether it's 1968 or 2004. Read one way, The Dreamers is undoubtedly a spirited critique of the ambitions of '68: for all their socialistic talk, the trio revel in luxury, slurping down grands vins, while the most significant red flag for them is Isabelle's period, signifying that she isn't pregnant.

However, the force of this critique is altogether febrile ( and frankly superfluous), and my overall feeling is that The Dreamers is simply a reworking of Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible (filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1950). A similar bisexual, incestuous trio, a similar set of games - even the tent they retreat into at the end is a steal from Les Enfants. In fact, seen this way, the little clips from the other movies that the trio worship (from Queen Christina to Shock Corridor and The Freaks), are only alibis devised to hide the larger theft. Still, there is nothing wrong with an hommage - but it can never be considered a chef-d'ouevre.

Dreamer
Cert: U