Lumpy potage of Sixties politics, "revolutionary" sex, and ravenous cinephilia, whipped up by Bernardo Bertolucci. Last Tango in Paris would seem to be the career milestone -- or is it millstone? -- to which the filmmaker here reverts: same city, same era, same revolution. Yet the recipe's main ingredient turns out to be the old-school cinephilia of the youthful trio of dreamers. There are clips from Shock Corridor, Queen Christina, Blonde Venus, Breathless, Band of Outsiders, Freaks, Scarface, City Lights, Top Hat, Mouchette, among others; and there are several show-offy and superficial discussions on the topic, together with some pretentious theorizing by the first-person narrator. All of this no doubt has a certain prelapsarian nostalgia about it (do young people today still debate Chaplin vs. Keaton?), but it would be largely embarrassing even without the auxiliary sexual gamesmanship of a ménage-à-trois composed of incestuous French twins of opposite sexes and an American naif from San Diego. (Surely his origins cannot account for his habit of peeing in the sink.) The sex comes into it only because the protests over the ouster of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française -- not an issue apt to galvanize the modern-day moviegoer -- has closed the place down, and left our cinephiles with a lot of time on their hands ("I've seen you around. You come to all the Nicholas Rays") and a lot of unchanneled passion. Hence, film buffs in the buff. The political mobilization at the end, the least of the ingredients in the soup, seems to come out of nowhere, or perhaps out of the flag-waving finale of Bertolucci's 1900. Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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