Winning sex games

By returning to the concerns of his film-making youth - sex, cinema and politics - Bernardo Bertolucci has undergone a rejuvenation. Set against the backdrop of the 1968 Sorbonne Riots in Paris, the 63-year-old director's new film has the freshness, audacity and energy of a film-maker half his age.

Punctuated by a soundtrack of Sixties' rock music from artists such as Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, The Dreamers is a threehander about a triangle of gilded youths. A French brother and his sister lure a young American into a week or so of eroticised, filmthemed, game playing; failure to correctly answer various film posers entails sexual forfeits. It is a game that quickly gives way to exclusive sexual activity and the potent prospect of romance and love.

Clearly its core inspiration is Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, which also deals with a pair of incestuously inclined siblings living in the intellectual hothouse environment of their bohemian parents' rambling apartment.

Featuring impassioned arguments on the relative merits of Chaplin and Keaton, Nicolas Ray and Sam Fuller, and liberally seasoned with clips from the work of Garbo, Dietrich and the nouvelle vague (half of Jean-Luc Godard's back catalogue pops up in one form or another), the movie - written by Gilbert Adair - is a billet doux to cinema and a film buff 's delight.

Bertolucci, whose preoccupation with filming attractive teenagers having sex has caused concern in some quarters, easily overcomes his detractors here. The moody style of the film, the relationships and the freeform composition seem deliberately to echo the movies of the nouvelle vague, Godard's Bande a Part in particular, whose vivacious trio find their latterday counterparts in The Dreamers.

The young cast of unknowns (Eva Green, Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt) handle themselves (and each other) with a freedom unfettered by adolescent anxiety, and bring a modern sensibility to the period posturings of these bohemian teenagers obsessed with films, sex and institutional fascism.

If it is unlikely that Bertolucci would have got away with scenes of masturbation in front of a picture of Dietrich as Lola-Loa, a coupling on the kitchen floor or a leak of menstrual blood in an overcrowded bath (Save water: bath with two friends!) three decades ago, they seem perfectly reasonable in the retro context now.

How The Dreamers will play in Peoria is anyone's guess. But it is certain to go down a storm on the Left Bank.