Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is the most incredible love letter to cinephiles ever created. It’s his fucking incredible care that makes you not only light up with the feeling of intimacy involved in an inside joke between you and the director every single fucking time you watch it, and go back through to make lists of things you know you’ve somehow missed, that you have to know…. but also to be just passively watching a film one day, here and there, and find another something he hid away in that movie. It’s like you can’t function watching any iconic films, after you’ve seen it, without thinking at least once of Bertolucci.
I’m watching Gloomy Sunday now, and have only just realized that the scene where Ilona lies down on the banks of the river with both of her arms outstretched for Laszlo and Andras on either side exactly mirrors the scene in The Dreamers where Isabelle does the same for Theo and Matthew in the tent. From the expressions on their faces, to the way she turns her head, to the moment when Laszlo/Theo nuzzles his face into her shoulder. There’s an obvious connection between the two films, but that’s the first time I’ve caught that scene.There are a lot of unanswered questions about the implications of that tent scene, and catching this moment in the other film certainly helps to make it more clear. And why wasn’t the film directly referenced outright, as so many others are? Because Gloomy Sunday was created after the setting of The Dreamers.
It just fucking makes you smile.
